Processwork is an awareness-based approach to psychological, relational, and collective change.
At its core, it offers a set of frameworks for understanding the dynamics of human experience, including dreams, conflicts and altered states of consciousness. It assumes that each person has their own unique inner process, and that this process can be explored and understood through attentive listening, open curiosity and a willingness to engage with what emerges.
Process is the core idea of Processwork. Process is the potentially meaningful flow of inner and outer signals, including behaviors, feelings, interactions, expression and both inner and outer experiences that can be observed in our individual and group lives.
Studying process reveals a structure that organizes even the most painful, disturbing or seemingly chaotic events and situations. This process can be facilitated to bring greater awareness and empowerment to individuals, organizational and business teams and communities.
Processwork offers a coherent way of understanding and engaging with reality, one that takes seriously several levels of awareness and experience that other frameworks often leave out. It trains you to notice the subtle signals running through every moment, such as the body’s barely perceptible movements, unintended gestures, dreams that seem irrelevant, the feeling-tone in a room. At its core, it’s built on a simple but radical idea: everything that’s happening is trying to happen more fully and all these signals can be followed and unfolded to help guide you there. This is why people often say that learning Processwork doesn’t just give you tools. It changes how you perceive and engage with the world around you, and, within you.
The frameworks of Processwork are concepts and structures that help you make sense of the world around you. Many people feel these frameworks provide language for what they already perceive, but might not yet have words for.
These frameworks apply across a wide range of contexts. The same basic concepts are useful for understanding what’s happening within you and your own body, as well as within relationships, a team meeting that keeps going sideways, a community, or to make sense of world situations. The methods adapt to the context, but the underlying frameworks stay the same.
Encountering Processwork’s frameworks is often the moment when people say things started clicking. The dynamics they’d been sensing for years suddenly had names. What had been invisible becomes something you can work with.
“Remember you are being moved. Swim and flow with the process, instead of fighting for only one solution.”
Arnold Mindell
Once you can understand what’s happening and have the frameworks to organize your seeing, the next question is what to do with it. Processwork practitioners are trained in a specific set of skills for following process and making aligned interventions. These skills are taught through a combination of theoretical study and a great deal of practical and experiential training.
What distinguishes Processwork facilitation from other approaches is its underlying orientation towards awareness and curiosity. They’re there to follow what’s already trying to occur, to bring awareness to what’s been overlooked and to help the process complete itself in whatever direction it naturally wants to go.
Processwork is a path of personal development for the practitioner themselves. The same idea that something is trying to emerge through the people you work with and that the work is to help it emerge, applies to you as well. There is a deep blossoming that wants to happen through you, in your own way, in the areas that matter most to you. Processwork training supports that.
This work doesn’t end. Practitioners with decades of experience will tell you that they’re still finding edges, still being humbled by their own process, still discovering parts of themselves they hadn’t known were there. The work shapes the worker. Over time, the result is the person you become through years of doing your own work.
Processwork was originally developed by Arnold Mindell, Amy Mindell and many other early students and researchers. As a modality, Processwork draws on ancient knowledge sources including Taoism and Indigenous teachings and combines these with modern sources including Jungian psychology, systems theory and quantum physics.
“When you are yourself and at home in the universe, you can bring others home. Then things start working better. When you are deeply in connection with the processmind, you are home.
When you are at home then, because of nonlocality, the other person is likely to be at more at home as well.”
Arnold Mindell
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.
If experience is a flow of changing perceptions
then shouldn’t your training enable you to work with all its aspects?
We offer a wide range of online and in-person courses at our institute in Portland, Oregon. These courses showcase the vast areas of application for Processwork.
