Comment

Process work is, in round numbers, a quarter century old. In the early 1970s, Arnold Mindell was beginning the research that gave rise first to dreambody work and then to process work. In that quarter century, despite an astonishing array of new developments, much has remained the same as in his initial work:

• Process work was and is grounded in experience and awareness, rather than in any conceptual notions of "what the psyche is made of."
• Despite all that we have learned about the structure and dynamics of process in the intervening years, the mysterious and unexpected aspects of experience still hold the greatest potential for growth and are still the focus of process work.
• Somatic experience, because it is hardest to control, remains the wellspring of the mysterious and unexpected aspects of experience.
• Taoism and physics, first investigated by Mindell as foundations of process work in his book River's Way, have proven themselves inexhaustible sources of inspiration for progress in process work.
• Although process work has become much more complex and subde over the years, it still rests upon the notions of primary processes, which are those experiences we embrace, secondary processes, which are those we disavow, and the edge which separates them.

Given the constancy of these foundational principles, what has enabled the rapid and constant growth of process work into ever more areas of human experience? The answer must lie in the spirit of research that has permeated the process work project since its inception. Process work has expanded into coma work, extreme states of consciousness, work with the dying, conflict resolution and world work with large, diverse groups because of Mindell and his associates' interest in testing the basic process concepts to the limits of human experience. Without this experimental spirit, process work, like any other therapeutic paradigm, would run the risk of becoming a lifeless body of methodology.

If the lines between foundations and applications of process work appear to be blurred, as is the case in this edition of the journal, it is perhaps because process work is built on the shifting sands of experience itself. What we call "foundations" may be better described as the gene pool of a still-evolving, living organism. In that case, looking for the true grounding of process work in its historical development may be as useful or futile as searching for the true nature of modern humankind in its amoebic forebears.

/Joe Goodbread June 18,1996