Process Work, developed by Arnold Mindell, offers shamanic work a respectful way of following what is trying to happen in a person: listening to body symptoms, dreams and unguarded words as messages, noticing the edges where a person stops, and working with the “secondary processes” that so often block change. Mindell drew openly on shamanism.
What is Process Work? #
A way of working that follows a person’s experience wherever it is trying to go, rather than steering it. It began, in the words of Riding the Horse Backwards, “in Zurich in the early 1970s”, when Mindell, then a Jungian analyst, felt the need “to bring movement and bodywork into his work”.1 He called it process-oriented psychology, and is known as its founder.2 Paul Francis counts him among the people he admires and who have inspired and taught him.3
Its basic trust is simple. In Working on Yourself Alone Mindell writes that “following our momentary process brings helpful solutions to inner and outer problems without having to repress anything.”4 Nothing is pushed away. Whatever turns up, a pain, a dream, a mood, a sudden movement, is treated as part of a process that has its own intelligence. See What does it mean to work therapeutically with process, parts and resistance?
What are primary and secondary processes? #
The part of us we know, and the part we do not. Mindell called what a person identifies with their primary process, and what happens to them without their meaning it their secondary process. In practical terms, “Secondary processes are often why people feel they want to change but find it so hard to do.”5
An example from healing: someone may say they want to get better, yet a part of them may have an investment in the illness, and so they “unconsciously sabotage it by mislaying their medicine or forgetting to take it, or forgetting about appointments”. Until that secondary process “is made conscious, and its concerns and issues are addressed and resolved, then any attempts at treatment are likely to fail.”6 The same is true of shamanic healing. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
How does Process Work understand body symptoms and dreams? #
As two faces of the same thing. Mindell called it the dreambody: “The dreambody appears as sentient, generally unrecognised sensations that eventually manifest in dream images, body experiences, and symptoms.”7 In Working with the Dreaming Body he writes that “Symptoms are potentially meaningful and purposeful conditions.”8 He does not make light of illness, though. A chronic symptom, he says, “is only theoretically an ally” and, left to itself, it hurts.9
Shamanism has always listened in this way. Hunter-gatherer peoples “were also people who paid close attention to things like their dreams, to the sensations and symptoms in their bodies, and to signs and signals in the world around them.” These “are all ways in which the unconscious ‘speaks’ to us”.10 Process Work offers a detailed modern method for that kind of listening. See How do body shock, armouring and childhood wounds contribute to dis-ease?
How do we notice a secondary process? #
By watching how something is said, as well as what is said. Mindell calls the messages we mean to send primary signals, and the ones that slip out without our meaning them double signals.11 In everyday words, parts of self that a person is not aware of “will reveal themselves in things like body-language, tone of voice, unconscious choice of words, contradictions in what they are saying”.12 Process Work offers a careful training in noticing these signals and following them, gently, rather than ignoring them or arguing with them.
What is an edge? #
The place where a person stops. In River’s Way Mindell writes: “The point at which the client says, ‘that I cannot do, or will not do’, is the point where he has reached an edge.”13 In Working on Yourself Alone he describes edges as “the boundaries of your own identity”.14 An edge is not a failure. It marks the line between who we think we are and something new that is trying to come through.
This fits closely with how Therapeutic Shamanism respects the protective parts of a person: “no deep or permanent change happens without the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer‘s consent”.15 Process Work offers a fine-grained way of finding exactly where that consent has not yet been given.
What are channels? #
The different ways experience reaches us: seeing, hearing, feeling the body from inside, moving, relationships and the wider world. Mindell noticed that each of us tends to live mostly in a few of them, and that “Most disturbances occur in unoccupied channels.”16 He also found that simply turning attention to an unused channel changes our state of consciousness: “FocusingFocusing. Eugene Gendlin’s method of turning towards the felt sense, the body’s whole sense of an issue, with curiosity and no agenda, and asking whether anything needs to happen. In this approach it is valued because, like journeying, it means going beyond the wants of the self and listening to something wiser and deeper. Read the full answer on an unoccupied channel such as proprioception creates an altered state”.17
This gives a simple, practical map of where a person’s attention habitually goes, and where it does not. It also suggests where to look when something keeps troubling them.
What is worldwork? #
Process Work taken out into groups, communities and conflicts. “Worldwork is the politics of awareness,” Mindell writes in Sitting in the Fire.18 He called its attitude deep democracy.19 He draws a clear line between a leader and an elder: “The leader follows a plan; the elder honours the direction of a mysterious and unknown river.”20 And he looks honestly at power, writing that “Rank is the sum of a person’s privileges.”21
Mindell traces this work back to the shamanic circle. “Shamanic dreaming is our common past,” he writes, and in worldwork “we recapture some of these fertile, dynamic properties of community.”22 See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
Did Mindell connect Process Work with shamanism? #
Yes, often. In Riding the Horse Backwards the Mindells describe Process Work as incorporating “the feeling of shamanism and performing arts”.23 Mindell says that when he is affected by a client and works on himself in the session, “This sort of inner work has its prototype in the shaman who goes in a trance to another world to help the client.”24 Where shamanism sees further, or differently, is set out in the companion answer. See What can shamanism offer Process Work?
