Remembering Julia Wright 1969-2026
A short message about Julia
Julia taught me for a year on the psychotherapy training programme at the Gestalt Centre and she was so open-hearted, creative, and compassionate as a tutor. She was immensely skilful at teaching plus she had a great sense of humour and some lovely quirkiness about her too. I can still see her now cycling along the road with multiple bags on her bike and a scarf flying behind her, carefree and jolly. I only knew her for a short while but feel deeply sad that she's gone so can only imagine how much she will be missed by those close to her x
Dear Julia We were students on the same psychotherapy course. Subsequently as colleagues and friends we walked on the Downs and in Sicilian hills. You even got me swimming in the cold outdoor pool in Lewes. And weeding your allotment!
You so generously shared your joys and your pains .You geve so much grace and energy to me and to the world.
I offer my grief and my celebration in honour of you.
All my love
I am saddened by the death Julia. I remember her as bright and full of energy and humour. She was a dear and compassionate colleague and I will miss her.
Julia was a friend and colleague and on joining the faculty we spent time together exploring and sharing our childhood experiences. She was entertaining, smart, creative with a generous spirit. I remember working together on building her new allotment and planning the canvas Tipi for her 50th birthday with endless revisions. Julia is a sad loss to those who enjoy life, laughter and dancing.
Another Month
Another month, another light gone out of my life. It seems like a relentless season of loss at present. I feel I’m barely catching my breath before the next one hits. It has not been even a week since the sudden death of my dear colleague and friend Julia Wright.
She was a psychotherapist and supervisor. We trained together at the Gestalt Centre London in the mid-1990s.
A former model and an artist at heart, Julia commenced her psychotherapy training 2 years later than I, and yet she managed to graduate much earlier, which was an obvious source of my envy. She became a tutor of The Gestalt Centre’s MA in Gestalt Psychotherapy programme, where she worked with psychotherapy trainees for ten years or so. I admired her dedication to teaching the craft of psychotherapy. On some level, I saw it as an extension of her artistic practice, serving as a laboratory for ideas and a way to deepen her and their personal understanding of the creative process. Sometime later, we ended up in the same supervision group that we shared for over 10 years.
Julia was a strong and feisty woman, without fear riding her bike in the streets of Lewes and London. A wonderful discussion partner—well-read, engaging, and a provocative thinker—who at the same time actively listened and encouraged deeper, open-ended dialogue, and fostered a safe, curious environment. Oh, I will miss you, my dear Julia!
Julia’s interest in art never faded and continued to inform her work with clients and supervisees. What’s more, it extended to designing her beautiful garden that bordered the nearby Glyndebourne grounds. Like me, she was an avid opera-goer and, unlike me, a skilled car mechanic, meticulously restoring a vintage 1960s van till the very end, in the cold evenings of late October last year.
Julia was just the kind of person whom Fritz Perls must have had in mind when he famously said that “Man transcends himself only via his true nature, not through ambition and artificial goals”. She was genuine, unassuming, and kind, and this is how I will remember her.
Some of you might have met her and, until now, have not known of her untimely and heartbreaking death. One day she was well, then she fell ill, and soon after she was gone. Her hasty death evokes imagery similar to a shooting star, a “falling that brightens the sky”.
“The calendar turns, a new month is here,
And with it, the weight of a sudden fear.
A new week begins, the world starts to move,
But it’s not the same world I wanted to prove.
She is no longer here to share in the start,
Leaving a silent, ache-filled heart.
Though time keeps ticking, insistent and fast,
I am still, for a moment, living in the past.”
Piotr
From Venus Narayan in memory of Julia