Signals express through what’s called channels of sensory experience. Some channels are more conscious or “occupied” for any given person, while others are largely outside of awareness and “less occupied.”
Processwork distinguishes between channels that are occupied, ones we’re aware of and identify with, and channels that are unoccupied, where information is flowing but we’re not consciously tracking it.
The information we do identify with makes up what Processwork calls our primary process: the person we understand ourselves to be. The information that flows through our unoccupied channels, often in ways that feel disturbing, surprising, or “not me”, belongs to our secondary process: something outside our usual identity. In the Processwork view, these signals of our secondary process are trying to enter our awareness and become part of who we are growing to be.
Many cultures are more heavily occupied in the visual channel and much less occupied in the movement channel. This is significant because the less occupied channels are where the unconscious aspects of process tend to communicate. These unintended expressions, such as a gesture, an instinctual sound, an image that arrives unbidden, often carry the deepest messages precisely because they’re slipping in through the channels you’re not monitoring.
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Body feelings such as warmth, pressure, tingling, heaviness, tightness.
Spontaneous gestures, postures, impulses to move.
Inner voices, songs, critical commentary, sounds from the world.
What you see in consensus reality as well as dream images, waking visions, images that arise spontaneously, colors, faces, places that appear in the mind’s eye.
The relationship channel reflects our quantum entanglement with one another. This includes what you pick up from others, what you project, the dynamics that arise, the roles you find yourself in and more.
Many of us have a world process. This includes your world view, events in the world around you, synchronicities, surprising encounters and more.
The channels framework gives practitioners a concrete, sensory-grounded way to follow what’s actually happening. The basic practice has a few core moves:
Notice the channel. Where is the information showing up? In words? In an image? In a sensation? In a gesture? In the relationship between us right now?
Notice which channel is occupied and which is unoccupied. Where is the person fully identifying with their experience and where is something happening at the edge of their awareness?
Amplify in the channel where the signal appears. This is one of Processwork’s distinctive contributions. Rather than translating everything back into talk, the practitioner helps the experience unfold in its own language. A movement signal gets amplified first through it’s own channel: movement. This may include slowing it down, exaggerating it, exploring it. Through amplification, you can support the person (or yourself) to expand the signal into other channels. Inquiring ito what it feels like, moving as the signal, what sound does it make, does a figure or an image emerge?
Let the meaning emerge through the experience, not before it. As Processwork movement teacher Kate Jobe writes, “Movement allows you to work directly with experience without knowing what that experience means; the meaning will make itself known through the experience.” The same is true of every channel. You don’t interpret a signal to follow it. You allow it to become known through the body and the active imagination occurring.
Integrate the information. Once a secondary experience has unfolded in menaing, Processwork weaves it back into more conscious awareness. Into words, relationship, a message for daily life.
Your body is talking. The space between you and another person is talking. The world itself, the field, is talking. Processwork doesn’t ask you to believe anything mystical about this. It just asks you to notice what’s already there and to follow it with curiosity in the language your body and your awareness already have access to.
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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