Your primary process is how you identify yourself in this moment. Forexample: composed, focused, in control. Your secondary process is everything that breaks through the edges of that. For example: the foot tapping while you say everything is fine, the hand going to the jaw when you speak about pressure at work,
While your primary process will communicate those aspects that you identify with and that you are intentionally wanting to communicate, your secondary process communicates through your unintended, unconscious communication.
In relationship, secondary signals may come through your body language, your tone, behvaoir such as laughing or clenching. When both of these happen at the same time, we call it a double signal. Part of the work of process work is turning towards the unintentional communication, seeing it as a meaningful part of the secondary process and wanting to hear its message.
When you are looking to understand your individual process, your body and your dreams are channels where your deeper process can begin speaking to you. What Arnold Mindell found in his early work on the Dreambody, is that the energy behind people symptoms would appear over and over in their nighttime dreams.
For example, a man with sharp stabbing pains in his belly dreams of sticking his hand in a blender at night. In his primary process he is very adaptable, soft and accommodating. Perhaps in his secondary process, he is learning to be more sharp.
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Intentional, conscious, congruent with your current identity. What you mean to do and say. The part of you that walks in the door and says "I'm fine."
Unintentional, spontaneous, marginalized. What slips through — the gesture, the symptom, the dream image, the movement that doesn't quite match the story you're telling.
The threshold between them. Where the secondary process knocks on the door and you hesitate, giggle, doubt, go quiet — the boundary of the known self.
The act of encouraging the secondary signal to complete itself, going further into the feeling, the movement, the sound, until its meaning becomes clear.
Process-oriented work can begin anywhere: a word, a posture, a symptom, a dream fragment. What distinguishes it is a particular quality of attention: non-pathological, non-corrective, genuinely curious about where the person’s process wants to go next.
Something appears that isn’t quite congruent with the main story: a gesture, a bodily sensation described in unusual language. This is the secondary process making itself known. The art is to catch it before it disappears.
Rather than interpreting the signal immediately, encourage it to complete itself. If it’s a body sensation, go further into it. Intensify it, describe it more precisely. If it’s a movement, let the movement grow. The signal has its own wisdom and knows where it wants to go. Read More on Channels!
At some point the experience will shift from a body sensation to an image, or from an image to a movement, or from a movement to a sound or an emotion or a memory. Follow the switch. The dreambody doesn’t stay in one channel; it moves toward the place where its message can most fully emerge.
There will be a moment of hesitation such as a giggle, a doubt, a sudden shyness. This is the edge. Something new is trying to enter awareness, and the old identity isn’t quite ready. The work here is gentle: name the edge, validate the fear, and ask what belief or figure seems to be saying “not yet.”
Once the dreambody’s message has come through as insight, as image, as a new way of moving or speaking, the question becomes: how does this live in ordinary life? What does the Chinese wrestler do on a Tuesday afternoon? The process doesn’t end with revelation; it continues in the way someone now moves through the world.
Maraya Karena is a Process Work Diplomate, Counselor and Consciousness Researcher based in Portland, Oregon.
“My passion is to study consciousness itself. To develop tools and models that support us to navigate everyday life. To make the reality we share more reflective of who and what we truly are. To find the pulsing, living heart of this life journey. And to engage with it fully and completely. I explore poetry, dance, embodiment, sex, social issues, futurism, philosophy, mysticism, joy and agony all to learn a little bit more about what is really going on and how we can most authentically express ourselves.”
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