The Origins of Processwork

The Origins of
Processwork

Exploring the flow of process across diverse cultures, contexts and areas of experience

Processwork was founded by Arnold Mindell, a physicist who trained as a Jungian analyst in Zurich. Working with clients in the 1970s, he noticed that people’s dreams and their body symptoms often seemed to be telling the same story. Following that thread became the beginning of Processwork.

Over the years, he was joined by students from around the world. They formed a research community who lived and worked alongside each other, testing concepts and methods against their own relationship conflicts, developing the body of work that would become Process-Oriented Psychology.

Later Arnold Mindell and others expanded this work into working with world issues, extreme and altered states, diversity and much more.

WEAVING ancient knowledge AND modern sources

Explore The Connection

Between Processwork And

Jungian Psychology

Processwork is the daughter of Jungian psychology, born inside its lineage and extending Jung’s understanding of the purposeful unconscious from dreams into the body, relationships, groups and the world.

Taoism and Earth-Based Psychology

Processwork draws from the Taoist instruction to follow nature and Indigenous earth-based wisdom, both pointing to nature as the deepest teacher, carrying these ancient streams into contemporary practice.

Quantum Physics

Processwork aligns with one of the central insights of modern physics – that consciousness is not separate from the physical world – treating dreams, signals, and fields with the same rigor that physics brings to waves, particles and the strange entanglements that connect them across distance.

“My goal became not just to understand what was happening, but to follow the river.”

Arnold Mindell

Curious to learn more?

Check out our upcoming courses to get a sense of the work

We offer a wide variety of online and in person courses at our institute in Portland, Oregon, United States. Our courses draw deeply from the roots, applying these areas of study to contemporary human issues.

“I am a consultant who lives in South Africa and has been working in the area of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion since 2001. My Master’s degree in conflict facilitation at PWI deepened my skills to work in this area. It provided me with additional tools and gave me the confidence to continue to work in this challenging area.”

Zed Xaba

Consultant, South Africa