Sitting in the Fire: Maria Makukha on Dreams, Attention, and the Art of Moving Toward What Calls Us

In this series of conversations, I’m exploring a simple but surprisingly complex question: what is “inner work,” and does it truly make a difference in our lives?

I’m speaking with professionals from psychology, facilitation, and therapeutic practice to understand what “working on yourself” means in real terms: what changes, what results people experience, and which concrete practices support that process. This article continues that exploration through a dialogue with Maria Makukha, a counseling psychologist and Gestalt therapist from Ukraine. (here’s her visit card and facebook profile)

I have known Maria for a very long time, and to me she is a truly unique person. First of all, she is an exceptionally strong organizer. I think that without Maria, the Deep Democracy Institute Ukraine might not exist at all - at least not in the form it is today. She was there at the very beginning and was one of its key organizational forces.

What also makes Maria unique for me is that she works from two approaches at once: Gestalt therapy and Processwork. When I first conceived this interview, I assumed we would mostly talk about the differences between the two - how Gestalt and Processwork understand inner work and dreamwork. But the moment we began, the conversation carried us into completely unexpected territory, where real jems of insight were waiting for us. I’m genuinely excited to share the discoveries that became true aha moments for me.

But before we go there, let’s begin at the beginning - with how Maria came to psychology in the first place.

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A Forbidden Book and the Theme of Death

There are standard routes by which people come into psychology: first a “serious” education, then work, then exhaustion with someone else’s script - and only after that, a turn toward psychotherapy. With Maria, it was the opposite. She entered psychology straight out of school, without long hesitation or a prolonged “search for herself,” and she herself admits that this is not the most common story.

In her case, psychology found her.

“I was sixteen. In my mother’s workshop, I found a volume of Castaneda. And on the cover there was a note in my grandmother’s pencil handwriting: ‘a very harmful book, do not read it, it can make you lose your mind.’ And for me, at sixteen, that was the best advertisement possible. A recommendation.”

She did not merely “read” the book - she devoured it, all the volumes that were there, all at once. She was literally enchanted by this new world: the path of dreaming, altered states, the sense that consciousness could be something different; the warrior’s path, the closeness of death, the tension of living “on the edge.”

Through Castaneda’s books, Maria chose her professional path. Even at university, her first serious academic works - her bachelor’s thesis and diploma thesis - were about attitudes toward death and psychological health. It is as if death had been part of her professional interest from the very beginning.

Later, in a session with Max Schupbach, one of the founders of the Deep Democracy Institute, Maria shared a dream: one of her first clients, who had died of cancer, came to her in the dream as if they were talking on the phone. Max called her a natural psychopomp - a guide between worlds.

But Castaneda gave her more than a profession - he gave her an ally. Death, always standing behind your left shoulder. This ally constantly reminds you of the value of the moment, of honesty with yourself. Against the background of the fourth year of the war in Ukraine, this metaphor sounds especially alive for her - not as pathos, but as an inner compass that guides.

You Just Step Into the Fire

Once Maria begins speaking about death as an ally, it becomes easier to understand how she works with challenge. When something bad or frightening happens, one part of us wants to distance itself, push it away, numb it out. But there is another part that wants to go inside it and remain there long enough for something in you to change. Maria calls this simply: sitting in the fire - also a reference to Arnold Mindell’s book of the same name.

Here is what that looks like in practice. After moving to Austria with her children, against a background of tension, uncertainty, and an endless stream of news, Maria began having sleepless nights that came close to panic attacks. And that state did not disappear just because she fought it.

Night. Sleeplessness. Exhaustion. Yet the body is full of activity, and the mind is overflowing with thoughts. In that moment, she decides not to try to suppress it as “anxiety.” She takes a notebook and begins with the body, with movement: she does not follow the content of the thoughts - the news, the future, the children, work - but their energy. She shows it with a gesture: the thoughts are hammering inside her skull, and she begins to unfold that rhythm through movement. From there an image comes: waves crashing over you and churning you up together with the pebbles until you no longer know where up is and where down is. And then - already from inside that image - text begins to emerge, whole poems. And once the text was written, something let go, and she was able to fall asleep.

What struck me was the certainty with which Maria says this. I used to carry around a whole internal debate about whether one should go into the fire, weighing the pros and cons. But watching Maria, I understood: for her this is not a “beautiful idea,” but a tested practice. When a state comes that frightens you, many people’s first reaction is to “remove it,” “switch it off.” Maria says: just step into the fire.

Inner Work as a Focus of Attention

When we arrived at the words “inner work,” Maria said it as if placing a full stop at the end of a long discussion: the key thing is attention. She returned to this formulation several times: “first of all, attention,” “it is about a different use of attention,” “that is the doorway.”

And this matters especially now, when attention is so easily scattered. In real life, it looks like this: a trigger appears - a news story, a conflict, a symptom, fear, a wave of shame or anger - and you are overwhelmed. The first thing that is easy to feel is the victim role: as though the situation is stronger than you, as though it is running your life.

Maria has a characteristic phrase: the very thing that haunts you often carries a strength that you can integrate - and that is precisely why it can become a doorway. But that doorway does not open when you are actively “explaining the situation to yourself” or trying to defeat it. It opens when you do something almost paradoxical: you step into the fire and keep your attention there.

And this is not about strain or effortful work; it is about presence. You sit in that state, just as in the nighttime story with the notebook. You do not argue with the storyline of the thoughts; instead, you feel their rhythm, their pressure, their energy. You allow what is rising from within to appear - an image, a movement, a phrase, an impulse. And in that observation, something begins to reveal itself: what can be integrated - strength, clarity, a decision, the next step.

The Contact Boundary: What Is Born Between Us

Maria speaks about Gestalt in a way that makes you hear not a “technique,” but a living scene: there is me, there is you — and there is also something else that appears between us. It is no longer just the sum of two people, but a new quality that is born only when there is interaction. She calls this the contact boundary: the place where we touch one another through words, pauses, gaze, tone — and even in the way we look away or suddenly begin to speak faster.

And such a boundary does not necessarily require another person. The contact boundary may exist between you and the field — between you and your work, the city, the body, a symptom, fear, a dream. Anywhere there is an “I” and a “something else” with which you are actually interacting, rather than merely thinking about it.

But interaction alone guarantees nothing. The second key element is attention to that boundary. Not to what I “think about you,” and not to how I “look in this situation,” but to what is happening right now: where contact grows denser, and where it breaks; what is born in the pause; what changes the direction of the conversation. When you keep your attention on the boundary, you begin to see both yourself and the other side more clearly - and also the information that emerges only in contact.

The Dream as Living Material

Maria says it simply: “I love working with dreams.” And then she adds a detail that immediately gives the subject more weight: at one point, her unfinished diploma thesis was also about dreams - she even laughs that perhaps she will finish writing it while we are talking. She resonates with the Jungian idea of The Childhood Dream - an early dream that may continue as a pattern, like a red thread through the whole life.

In Gestalt, dreamwork often begins with projections: you enter the different dream figures, embody them, live them. The dream does not lie in front of you as a text - it comes alive through roles. You move into a figure, speak from its place, feel it through the weight of the body, its tempo, its gaze - and in that way something opens up that often remains invisible in everyday life. A therapist may even ask very directly: if you put the content of the dream into the background, what message would remain?

When Maria works with dreams, her entry point begins with what the client has already brought into the room. She watches how the person tells the dream, what movements appear, where they slide past something, where they hesitate. Almost always, she begins with one question: “What aftertaste did this dream leave in you?” And from there, she moves forward.

Then she orients herself by structure. Sometimes there are dream fragments - “just a fragment of an impression with an aftertaste,” and Maria emphasizes that this too can be “highly charged.” And sometimes there is a dream with a clear role structure - and then she places the dream images around the room, walks between them, embodies each role, and gathers what appears as if collecting puzzle pieces. More on the technique of this work below.

Alongside Gestalt methodology, Maria describes what she calls her “icing on the cake” - interventions she learned from Max Schupbach. They sound brief and sharp, as if they immediately show you where to look. One of her favorite examples: “You dreamed of your ordinary kitchen, a pot, your cat, and a unicorn - so what would you work with first?” The orienting answer is: look where the charge is strongest, where it is strangest, and at the same time furthest from your identity.

Another episode is a dream with dolphins. In a session with Max, Maria mentioned the dolphins, and he asked: “Who in your life could play the role of those dolphins?” And in that moment, two things came together: the relationship channel, the contact boundary - and the way a dream can be grounded in lived reality through the recognition of an energy. For Maria, the dolphins were linked to a very specific impression from a Mindell seminar: the way they moved, the way they interacted, the amount of inner freedom they carried. This pointed to an energy within herself that she had not yet fully recognized or owned - something she came to see as deeply important to integrate.

This is exactly where Maria’s particular “taste” can be felt: for her, a dream is material that can be arranged in space, felt through the body, assembled like a puzzle, and then followed by one precise step into what is most charged — into what is strange and far from the familiar self. And that, in her experience, is often where the thing that wants to be integrated is waiting.

Practices and Interventions You Can Take With You

Toward the end of our conversation, Maria shared a practice and several moves she actually uses in her work. They are easy to try alone, with a therapist, or in a group. All of them share the same logic: we are not looking for the “correct explanation” - we are looking for an energy that lies far from the familiar self, and we are trying to live it.

The Practice: “Polarities → Image → Dream Figure”

1. First, write down three qualities you know in yourself and value most. These might be “kind,” “responsible,” “hardworking,” or anything else that sounds like your usual self. Then, opposite each quality, write its polarity - the opposite. Something with which you do not usually identify, something that may even irritate or frighten you a little.

2. Then look at those three polarities together and ask yourself: what image do they form? Maria suggests allowing the image to come without rushing - as a figure, a character, a “something” that has shape and character.

3. Once the image appears, take the next step: enter it. You can draw it. You can stand up, take its posture, feel its weight, its gait, its breathing, its voice. This is the Dream Figure - a figure you do not analyze from the outside, but try to become, so that you can feel what it carries for you.

Maria mentioned one example: a very delicate, feminine woman entered her image so fully that she “discovered a stone Hulk inside herself” - and there was so much grounding and strength in it that she did not even want to come out of it. That is exactly how this practice works: what had seemed “not mine” suddenly becomes a source of support.

Three Moves Maria Uses in Dreamwork

1. The first is the question about aftertaste. When there is a dream or a strong state, Maria begins with a simple prompt: “What aftertaste did this leave in you?” This immediately shifts the focus from storyline to energy and shows where the charge is.

2. The second is to arrange the dream around the room. If the dream contains several images or scenes, she suggests literally “placing” them in space: giving each one a location, a vector, a figure. Then you walk between those points and briefly embody each image: take its posture, its breath, its voice. And then gather what emerges from the different roles like puzzle pieces. This is the step that transforms the dream from a story into a bodily experience.

3. The third is Max’s question from the dolphin story I mentioned earlier: “Who in your life could play this role?” It grounds the energy of the dream sharply in reality: you begin to recognize where this quality already exists in your relationships, or where it exists in you but has not yet been owned.

If you gather these moves into one line, you get a very Maria-like algorithm: find the aftertaste → give the dream form in space → take one precise step toward the energy that is strangest and furthest from the familiar self.