Innerwork

Innerwork is Foundational to Processwork

Innerwork is used to make meaning and contextualize how a current experience belongs to the larger, overarching story.

Processwork has developed a particular set of skills for attending to what’s happening inside you and specific tools for unfolding those experiences as they arise. As you unfold an experience, you can also see how it fits within the larger process structure. You can then use that understanding to find creative ways of re-engaging with inner or outer situations.

Process-oriented inner work is a way of paying attention to yourself that is curious rather than corrective. It treats every signal, the tightness in your jaw, the song stuck in your head, the bird that just landed on the fence, as a doorway into a wider knowing of who you are and what wants to happen.

The Power of Innerwork

The orientation Processwork brings to everything else, following process rather than directing it, treating disturbances as meaningful, trusting the intelligence in experience, applies first to your relationship with your own inner life. Practitioners working in every other area of Processwork return to their own inner practice as the place their outer capacity gets grown and renewed.

For Practitioners

You can't really follow someone else's process if you've lost touch with your own. You can't help a group hear its marginalized voices if you can't hear the voices you've marginalized inside yourself. You can't facilitate conflict with eldership if you've never sat with your own inner conflicts long enough to know them. This is why inner work runs through every other area of Processwork practice. Practitioners all return to their own inner work as the place where their capacity to do the outer work is grown and renewed.

For Everyone

Inner work is for anyone who wants a deeper relationship with their own experience. It's a way of working with yourself that helps you know who you are at a level most of daily life doesn't reach. It's also a way of finding relief when life gets hard. When something difficult is happening, a body symptom, a relationship, grief, anxiety. Inner work gives you a way to meet what's happening. And for many people, inner work becomes a doorway to something larger. A greater feeling of connectedness to something greater than yourself.

What inner work looks like in Practice

The starting point for innerwork can be anything.

A body sensation
A dream story, figure or fragment
A mood you’re in
A song stuck in your head
A small flicker of awareness, a flirt, that caught your attention for no obvious reason
An image, an inner voice, a half-formed feeling

Once you choose something to work with, you apply the levels of reality and the channels of experience to unfold it.

Inner work in Processwork training

For those who go on to train in Processwork, inner work becomes a daily companion. You're not only learning skills and frameworks. You're being shaped by the same work you're learning to offer others. Trainees develop their own ongoing inner practice over years. They work with their dreams, their body symptoms, their relational patterns, their edges, their reactions in the room. They bring this material into supervision and into peer practice groups. They watch how their inner process changes the kind of facilitator they're becoming. This is what gives Processwork practitioners the capacity to do the work they do. Inner work supports you to sit with a person in extreme distress, to follow a dream into surprising places, to facilitate a group through a hard moment. If you're drawn to this kind of depth, whether to deepen your own life or to eventually offer this work to others, our programs offer many ways in.

“When you ignore sentient, dreamlike perceptions, you have overlooked the spirit of life, your greatest potential power.”

Arnold Mindell,

We are neither this way nor that; we are a body which is in the midst of change and evaporating. We are timeless, thousands of years old, and involved with processes which go beyond our present identity. This gives us an eternal feeling, but one which is realizable right here in the moment.

Curious?

Books on Innerwork

LEAP INTO LIVING

How people from all walks of life have used essential spiritial teachings to live and die more freely.
by Gary Reiss

DISPELLING WETIKO

Confronting the nature of evil in ourselves and our world
by Paul Levy

UNINTENTIONAL MUSIC

The unintentional appears at moments when some hidden part of us, something beyond our usual awareness, suddenly tries to express itself. If we start paying attention to what is trying to happen rather than to what we think should happen, we open the door to self-discovery and creativity.
by Lane Arye

BIG MEDICINE

A guide for anyone interested in health and healing, including patients, providers, and caregivers who want to uncover the deeper meaning of physical symptoms and build a new relationship with their bodies.
by Pierre Morin

WORKING ON YOURSELF ALONE

introduction to process-oriented meditation is a fresh approach to the new body of philosophy and technique that unites the foundations of Western psychotherapy and Eastern meditative traditions.
by Arnold Mindell

RIDING THE HORSE BACKWARDS

“Go on, ride the horse backwards. Let the impossible unfold.” A primer on self-exploration that puts crazy wisdom and dreaming just before linear thinking and common sense.
by Arnold and Amy Mindell

SPEAK OUT: TALKING ABOUT LOVE, SEX AND ETERNITY

How the diverse members of our modern world can learn to appreciate one another by following the mysterious spirit of life. How we can move beyond simple tolerance into a joyous celebration of the unique beauty of all perspectives.
by Dawn Menken

Ready to go deeper?

Explore our courses and online community

We offer workshops, classes, and longer training programs throughout the year, in person and online. Whether you’re new to this work or looking to deepen your practice, there’s likely something in the upcoming calendar for you.

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More Applications of
Processwork

Processwork offers a range of tools and techniques for working with this inner and outer process. It is a flexible modality with frameworks for understanding what is actually going on and tools for how to facilitate it.

Processwork is applied in a wide diversity of areas including innerwork, relationships, dreams and body symptoms, organizations and group work, conflict studies and states of consciousness.