Process Work Origins: Part One

This short series of essays is minuscule in light of the vast territory that is Process Work. With my imperfect knowledge and partial perspective – I want to share and attempt to demystify this thing that I love, that I’m getting behind and that I think could change the world.

You know those moments…

they’re rare.

There’s a before you and an after you.

Something happens, you learn something new, and BAM, changed in an instant.

I was in my kitchen, 2014, during afternoon meal-prep in Morjim, Goa when I heard this interview. David Bedrick, a Process Oriented Psychologist and Diplomate was the guest on my favorite radio program New Dimensions. As I listened, it was as though he was stoking a previously unidentified truth in me that I’d not articulated but could feel. He described being with clients and following their communication – often nonverbal – until they reflected their own patterns of wellness. Pause for a moment here. This is revolutionary. To see the client’s problem, not as a problem, but rather full of information, holding the seeds to it’s own undoing. He spoke about “unfolding” the client’s communication through deep listening, tending, following signals and including all that is witnessed. All that is witnessed. This is also revolutionary. Rather than dismissing – a gesture, a tone, an unconscious expression – it is harvested, providing immense value. I was awestruck. I felt the deeper parts of my experience relax. Validated.

Certain aspects of my personality primed me to be receptive to PW. I’m obsessed with languages – perhaps because I love to connect. I’m obsessed with maps – maybe because I get lost often. And I’m obsessed with embodiment – as I’ve been disembodied much of my life. What I love about languages, maps and embodiment is how they are portals into life and living itself. Intimate, tangible, they make life knowable through direct experience. This is empowering and I like that.

Process Work uses all three systems – languages, maps and embodiment – and because it’s somatically based, a-cultural, universal. PW is like an alphabet to a multi-dimensional language. It offers a living cypher to communication emerging in and from the body, relationships and the larger social fields we inhabit. This cypher allows us to translate from the vast storehouse of information captured in the unconscious mind, and existing in the collective unconscious and makes it accessible to the conscious mind. It does so through framing experience, mapping the terrain of emerging signals, attractors, disturbers, edges, roles and rank. It lends perspective and self-knowledge. With perspective, we can co-create with the emerging process.

PW is a “learn by doing” language of how the body speaks. Of the way the unconscious mind breaks through into awareness. It is a sensitivity of listening, of feedback, of framing and embodying what is unfurling in real time.

A direct experience of this knowing is the signal one gets from the unconscious mind to drink water. The body knows it’s thirsty, it sends a dry mouth signal and if you listen, you relieve the thirst. Irrefutable.

Not all signals are direct though. Processes are nuanced by nonlinear symptoms and signals from deeper or marginalized pasts. They are patterned by bigger fields – time and evolution.

If it seems mysterious, it is.

Fast forward almost a decade and I’m upstairs in my Mountain home having a session with a friend-Process Worker. I was working on managing expectations. First of all, ugh. Can anyone relate to the dreaded disappointment from having unhealthy expectations? Yes, it’s a thing. As though, unable to know and communicate reasonable needs, reasonable needs become expectations and expectations almost inevitably lead to disappointment. Viscous cycle. Working with me, she noticed my body movement as I explained this issue. She noticed that I was gathering momentum from behind me and moving it forward, as though I was miming a storm rolling in. She unfolded this movement with me – urging me to amplify it, go deeper into it and embody the feeling of having unreasonable expectations. I visualized the storm: dark, painful, originating back in time, as if in the dawn of my family lineage or even human history itself. While feeling this storm-generating expectations, she asked me a series of questions about the experience that we unfolded one at a time. What was underneath the storm of expectations – a field of love and feedback. What did this storm want from me – it wanted me to become bigger. Bigger? What does this mean? In my case, rather than expecting myself to have fewer expectations – which is what I originally thought I needed to work on – I got the clear message that in being bigger and standing for what I really needed at my core, the pain of rejection and unmet needs would pass through me to an undercurrent of love and non-dual feedback.

As with any “subjective intervention,” the messages are tailor-made for the individual experience, they don’t generalize well. For me, without this guidance, I’d have been stuck problematizing. In a loop of: “I have unreasonable expectations, so what are reasonable expectations?” Whereas here, something as fuzzy and seemingly unrelated as how I spoke about my dynamic revealed a pattern, generous information and wisdom I could get behind. This is a leap from clinical interventions, where symptoms and people are problematized and interventions are often external. Instead, PW is a practice. A practice of directing attention. It’s a heuristic because it’s a learning modality. Initiatory – trial by fire. And phenomenological, because it’s based on lived experience. The fundamental assumption it rests on, is that it’s not all up to us. Inside, exists a process – albeit communicating in nonlinear, nonverbal signals – that “knows” what is needed. This “knowing” lies under the surface of the conscious mind – tied up in movement and speaking patterns, signals, sensations and symptoms that require tending in order to participate with and thus to fully “know.”

Attention. Embodied experience. Awareness of signals. Gnosis. These traits are missing from dominant modes of communication, interaction, norms and social capital. Unsurprising, I write about why here. Process Work feels to me like a step in a different direction. And by different, I mean different from the dominant current, but also different for each individual. As such, it represents a way for deep relationship with your interiority, with your own subjectivity.