DONATE

PWI Diplomate Spotlight:

Cathy Bernatt

August 9, 2015. Cathy Bernatt is leaving Portland at 6pm.

Three-week wilderness solo ahead. Divorce just final. Third master’s degree in Process Work done. She’s ready to go deep into discovering what I and the world wanted from her next.

At 7:39pm an 18-wheel drunk commercial truck driver swerved into her lane. S

She hit the median. Spun. Hit the trailer. Spun. Spun towards the median at 60 miles an hour. She sees death. She closes her eyes and waits for her body to shatter. 

It doesn’t. But almost everything else does.

Traumatic brain injury. Emergency surgery. Ninety minutes of physical therapy just to get out of bed. Eight months of headaches that built through the day until they were almost unbearable. She wasn’t allowed to work for two and a half years.

A year later, on the way to her first dinner party since the accident, the Uber she's riding in gets T-boned.

Second brain injury. Four tendons snapped. Everything she’d rebuilt, gone.

“Process Work didn’t save me,” she says. “It went into the wreckage with me.”

After the accident, Process Work became an indispensable companion as she navigated a very different wilderness journey than the one she had planned. Already a graduate of PWI’s Masters in Conflcit Facilitation and Masters in Processwork, she went deeper in. Through the Dream Body Medicine Forums she worked with Dr. Pierre Morin. Going into the mystery, coming out with only the next step.

 

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Receive information about upcoming events, training opportunities and interesting perspectives from the world or Process Work.

Then came what she calls Cathy's Not Art Art.

Twice a day, hands moving through pastels and watercolor and acrylic, making knotted, tangled scenes she couldn’t have planned. Her hands could make visible what her brain could not.

A friend, Ivan Verny, a Swiss psychiatrist and Process Worker, suggested attaching haiku to each piece. A way back through the side door, syllable by syllable. Over five years she made hundreds of them.

"And I learned, really learned for the first time, how to BE and feel the wisdom, intelligence, and mystery alive in that BEING, in all its nuanced forms. Until then, much of my life had been organized around doing. Five years of recovery. Today, it remains the gift that keeps on giving. It put me in contact with my body somatically in a way nothing else could have... All of it runs deeper now because of what those years taught me from the inside."

More about Cathy Bernatt

A Master Certified Coach, Professional Facilitator, and Organizational Development consultant, Cathy works at the messy intersection of power, conflict, culture, and change. She has a gift for surfacing the undiscussables: the tensions, silences, and hidden roles that quietly shape how people lead, relate, and make meaning together. For more than four decades, she has worked globally with Fortune 100 companies, NGOs, hospitals, educational institutions, and executive teams across cultures, including two decades living and working in Japan. Her approach blends pragmatic skill-building with deep inner work, helping people understand how their relationship with power shapes their impact and the cultures they build. Learn More Here

Related Posts

More Topics
You May Enjoy

Continue exploring with articles connected to your interests