Something catches the corner of your eye. Just for a moment. A flicker of light, a shape, a movement. A word from across the room snags your attention for half a second before your mind moves on. A faint feeling rises in your chest as someone is talking. And disappears before you can name it. A bird flies past the window at exactly the moment you’re considering a hard decision.
Most of us let these moments pass. They’re too brief, too odd, too “nothing” to bother with. But in Process-Oriented Psychology (Processwork), founded by Dr. Arnold Mindell, these fleeting perceptions have a name and a great deal of importance. They’re called flirts
A flirt, in Processwork terms, is a brief, flickering perception that catches your attention before your conscious mind can fully register it. Arnold Mindell describes flirts as “subtle, flickering, evanescent” and as “non-repeatable signals which require focus, amplification and imagination.” TheProcess Work Glossary puts it this way: where ordinary signals persist, flirts are “presignals.” They are registered by our subconscious perception, but barely paid attention to by our conscious mind.
Mindell developed this idea most fully in his book Dreaming While Awake, where he argues that we are surrounded by “an unending dreamfield of information” and that flirts are how that dreamfield reaches out to us.
We notice them for a fraction of a second and then push them aside as irrelevant. He suggested that this marginalization is part of what leaves people feeling vaguely depressed, disconnected, or like something is missing. We are only engaging with part of reality and one level of our human experience.
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Using Processwork skills to unfold flirt is a powerful kind of innerwork. It is essentially learning to use your body and your perception as an oracle to be in an active conversation with your life experience and working with the signals that catch your attention as you would with figures in a dream.
The basic moves look something like this:
Notice that something noticed you. This is the first and biggest step. Most of the work is just slowing down enough to register that a flirt happened at all. You can practice catching the moment when something briefly grabs your attention throughout your day.
Don’t try to interpret too quickly. Flirts are easily killed by the rational mind. If you immediately ask “what does this mean?” you’ve already left the flirt behind and entered back into your conscious mind.
Amplify the signal. Processwork uses the channels of experience and the levels of reality to unfold the energy of the signal that you are perceiving. What was the quality of that flicker? If it were a being, what kind of being? What is it like to be that thing: the river, the pigeon, the chipped mug, the chime?
Get into the state of the energy. Through unfolding, you may find a state, a quality of energy and consciousness. Or you may find an archetypal figure with a message for you.
Bring it back into the rest of life. Once you’ve unfolded the flirt, it’s message can be woven back into the consensus-reality situation it arose in. You can ask the state or the figure to give you a tip, a message or a gift that it has for you in your every day life.
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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