Including states that other approaches rarely engage with or treat only as something to be medicated away. Altered states, extreme states, deep meditative experiences, flow states, comatose and near-death states. Processwork sees all of these as meaningful, and applies the same frameworks of signals, channels, and process structure to work with them as it does with any other experience.
Out of decades of practice has come a body of skills for entering these states with awareness, communicating across them, and following what’s emerging, or trying to emerge .
If you’re drawn to this work, whether through your own life, the people you care about or your professional practice, states of consciousness is one of the areas where Processwork has gone furthest and continues to evolve.
From a Processwork lens, what looks like absence or breakdown from the outside is often meaningful experience from the inside. Contact across the gap is possible when you know how to listen.
The practitioner brings warmth, patience, and a quality of presence that can sit with what’s happening without trying to push it away. This is delicate work and it asks a lot of the person doing it. Most of the training is about cultivating the inner capacities that make the contact possible.
Core skills include:
“Global awareness means appreciating and working with the altered states that groups, like individuals, need for life.
This is, after all, why we create rituals, dances, plays and musical festivals.”
Arnold Mindell
CITY SHADOWS
Analyzes fourteen cases including schizophrenia, depression and suicidality—arguing that these states are "city shadows," or repressed, meaningful experiences, rather than just illnesses.
by Arnold Mindell
OUTSIDE MENTAL HEALTH: VOICES AND VISIONS OF MADNESS
explores mental illness from the perspective of those who have experienced it, featuring interviews with over 60 individuals, including patients, activists, and professionals, to challenge conventional psychiatric narratives.
By Will Hall
New ethics, new skills and metaskills in working with and supporting people in comas. Step-by-step exercises teach how to get in contact with comatose people.
by Amy Mindell
HEALTH IN SICKNESS, SICKNESS IN HEALTH
A long overdue conversation about the very concepts of health and sickness, and what is considered to be “normal.”
by Pierre Morin
Techniques and tools for communicating with those in out-of-ordinary states of consciousness such as those found in dementia, coma or the dying experience
by Ingrid Rose and Kay Ryan
An in-depth look at the practical applications of process-oriented coma work and how to bring this approach into hospice.
by Stan Tomandl
Offering verbatim bedside reports, theoretical discussion and practical exercises, the author demonstrates his techniques for communicating with the comatose person.
by Arnold Mindell/small>
Investigates the widely held belief that dementia is only a "mindless pathology". Instead, the authors discover an essential, soulful, spiritual process that can be facilitated.
by Stan Tomandl and Tom Richards
Practical, body-centered ways of communicating with coma patients, showing family members and caregivers how to enter the patient’s inner world of experience to engage their will and power to heal.
by Gary Reiss and Pierre Morin
We offer workshops, classes, and longer training programs throughout the year, in person and online. Whether you’re new to this work or looking to deepen your practice, there’s likely something in the upcoming calendar for you.
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.
