Processwork offers a range of tools and techniques for working with 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.
Inner work is a creative mindfulness practice for following the flow of your own experience. This includes your conscious thoughts and feelings, but also the unconscious reactions, non-verbal communication and half-noticed phenomena throughout your day. Process-oriented innerwork unfolds these signals to find messages, which can be meaningful for your everyday self.
The dreambody is Processwork’s foundational discovery that the same unconscious process showing up in your nighttime dreams is also expressing itself in your body experiences through your symptoms, sensations and spontaneous movements. These are all part of the same dreaming intelligence asking to be followed.
Processwork treats every relationship as a living system with its own dreaming process, helping couples and partners recover the mythic bond that first connected them, work productively with conflict and trust that even the most painful dynamics carry information the relationship system can use to grow and thrive.
Processwork extends the same attentiveness it brings to dreams and symptoms into the life of organizations, communities and the world. It uses the values of deep democracy and a specific set of facilitative skills to help collective systems understand themselves, work with power, hear the marginalized voices and find the systems intelligence attempt to emerge.
Processwork approaches conflict not as a failure to be managed away, but as the deeper system trying to know itself and find it’s own way forward. It offers models that help facilitators follow conflict through its natural arc toward genuine, if temporary, resolution. The love of research is still at the heart of everything we do. Students and practitioners continue to research, study and evolve how to work effectively with conflict.
Processwork was and continues to be a pioneer in approaching extreme and altered states, including coma, psychotic episodes, and near-death experiences. The paradigm sees these states as potentially meaningful inner journeys that can be entered, communicated with and learned from.
“Within what we call problems are paths we haven’t explored yet. The momentary awareness of signals and feelings, images and motions, shows the way.”
Arnold Mindell
We offer a wide variety of online and in person courses at our institute in Portland, Oregon, United States. Our courses showcase the diverse areas of Processwork application.
