About The Process Work Institute

Every living tradition begins with a question someone couldn’t stop asking. For Arnold Mindell, Jungian analyst and author, that question was both simple and complex: what is actually happening beneath the surface of our experience, and what does it want from us?

Drawing on Jungian thought, quantum physics and the wisdom traditions of indigenous peoples, Mindell began mapping a territory that resisted easy categorization. When he wrote The Shaman’s Body, his ideas reached a group of students at Antioch College in the United States. In that original, unpublished manuscript, 5 friends followed their dreaming, leaving the United States for Zürich, Switzerland to study and practice with Arnold Mindell.

What followed was a decade of shared life and work. This original community lived alongside each other in Switzerland, studying ideas and testing them against the texture of their real experience.

They explored their own relationships, conflicts and edges. When difficulties arose between them, as they inevitably did, they didn’t look away. They brought the same quality of attention to their struggles that the work itself demanded. And they experimented with frameworks and interventions to see what would help them resolve their own issues.

The core theories of Processwork were shaped by that lived experience as well as extensive formal research.

In time, Mindell had a dream that pointed him back to the United States. The community followed, and in 1989 the Processwork Center of Portland was incorporated in Oregon, later renamed the Processwork Institute. In January 1992, the Institute received authorization from the State of Oregon to offer a degree in Processwork. A second program in Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change began in 2004. In 2014 the Institute launched a parallel program in Process-Oriented Facilitation and Conflict Studies, receiving national accreditation in 2016.

Over three decades of graduate training, the Institute graduated more than 200 students, whose work now reaches into organizations, communities and clinical settings around the world.

Processwork itself has evolved over that time. It is now commonly described as an awareness practice and facilitation modality applied to diverse areas from inner work and leadership development, to organizational and group facilitation, to conflict work in public forums, to therapy with individuals, couples and families and to working with comatose and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

The Institute today continues the original, inspiring tradition to understand what lies beneath conflict, what experience itself is trying to communicate and what becomes possible when we learn to pay closer attention.

We offer professional continuing education, personal development programs and community courses, both online and in person, carrying forward the dedication of everyone who has contributed to this work since its earliest days in Zürich. And to the ancestors, spirits and quantum energies that help guide the way.