What is the Point of Process Work?

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

What is the point of process work? This simple question is almost impossible to answer, but each time we try it yields new insight. There is no one answer, since the response changes with different times and different people. Sometimes the point is related to the thing that draws us to process work, such as wanting to get to know ourselves, healing, working on our night-time dreams, finding a path, or a quest for wholeness. At other times, we are interested in solving a problem, dealing with racism, sexism, ageism, or rank, power, and other world channel experiences. We might want to get along in relationships, get centered, follow our process, and many, many more things.

As time goes on, the most enduring goal of process work for me is connecting with and living the dreaming process, or what the Taoists call the Tao. The things that draw us into considering and working on ourselves, such as symptoms, relationship problems, or a search for wholeness or meaning, often serve as a beginning point or inroad for living our dreaming process. When we lose contact with the dreaming process, life may seem senseless and bland. We may feel that we are missing some essential connection to eternity and mystery.

The dreaming process is both individual and collective. We experience it in our dreams and problems as individuals and in collective trends like music, fads, and weather patterns and in difficulties such as group, political and social problems. For the purpose of this article, I would like to suggest that dreaming while you are asleep is part of the dreaming process which is happening all the time in the disavowed experiences of our lives and that the dreaming process is one way in which these dreams are lived out in our everyday lives.

What is the dreaming process?

In Rivers Way: The Process Science of the Dream-body, Mindell writes in detail about the ancient concept of the dreaming process. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse describes the dreaming process as the Tao. Mindell shows that the dreaming process is a living, in-the-moment experience, not a static in-the-future one. In a 1993 lecture in Bombay, Mindell described the dreaming process as a subterranean river that is always flow ing. He suggests that things that disturb us in our lives, like relationship problems, symptoms and feelings, movement problems, sounds, visions and dreams, habits, job, family or social problems, provide access routes to that river. It is often relieving and fulfilling to get into the river and live our true selves. Many people experience the dreaming process as a direct experience of the spirit, the sacred, or even the Goddess, God, or the Tao; it often points to the meaning in life when things look hopeless.

The dreaming process and God

The dreaming process is the source of our sense of self, our uniqueness, and at the same time our connection with both the collective and personal aspects of the eternal. It both distinguishes us from others and connects us to a greater whole. Losing touch with the dreaming process is one of life's greatest disappointments, a psychological/spiritual crisis that can create feelings of hopelessness, depression, or even despair. Most of us know about this loss in one of its simplest forms: when we can no longer hope for something, the world seems a very dull place.

For example, I recently worked with a client who came into my practice saying that she had nothing to work on. I asked her what she was so hopeless about that she couldn't bring it up. She looked at me very strangely, as if she recognized something in what I was asking. At first she said that she couldn't think of anything. Her strange look continued, so I pursued the question a little further. She said that she hadn't been able to get out of bed that morning. Her body hurt and she felt too tired and heavy to get up. She felt depressed. She was also concerned about a long term problem with her co-workers. She said that it was as if she were being put down or contained by something that didn't allow her to get out of bed.

Because she described her experience in movement terms, we unfolded it in that channel. We played out the interaction between two figures: one being held down and one holding the other down. When we unfolded the part being held down, we found that it wanted more spirituality and what she called "large moments" in her life. It also wanted more of the deep experiences that she got from therapy and more from our relationship. The interaction between these two parts made her aware of her need to bring spiritual depth into her everyday life. Without the possibility of dreaming, she was depressed and unable to get out of bed. We satisfied the part's demand that she get more from our relationship by going deeply into our unexpressed feelings for each other.

How had I guessed that she was hopeless in the background? We had just been walking up the stairs to my office together and had made little contact. The question about what she was hopeless about just popped into my head. I was unaware of any signals that might have suggested that she was hopeless or depressed. Since my dreaming process dreamt the question, I would have felt depressed myself if I hadn't asked it, because I would not have been able to live my own dreaming process. What you are dreaming, or what is happening in your dreaming process, is an important part of who you are. You can be nothing else. At the same time, you are not dreaming your own individual dream but one that is connected to other people, animals, things, and beings.

Loss of the dreaming process

The following experiences helped me see that contacting the dreaming process creates hope and a feeling of well being. Dreaming connects us with something larger than ourselves, something spiritual: the Tao, God, or a higher self. Although this concept may be too simplistic as a single background philosophy for working with people, I find that it is an extremely useful idea.

Let's consider a woman who attended a relationship seminar that my partner, Joe Good-bread and I facilitated. I'll call her Anna. She is in her 50s and has had breast cancer which was successfully treated. Since her cancer diagnosis and treatment, she has made dramatic changes in her life. Anna married at the age of 14 without having had a previous relationship and became a mother and housewife. She was illiterate, which was not uncommon for her age and class in the

place she lived. As was expected in her culture, she stayed married to her husband even though, in her words, "There was no relationship." She felt obliged to stay with him because she felt people would gossip about her if she left. She was angry with other people in her life because she had the impression that condemned her. Instead of empathizing with her, they criticized her by saying that it takes two people to make relationship difficulties.

At the time of the seminar, Anna had finished grade school and was nearing the end of her high school education. Her children had grown and she was divorcing her husband and planning for a career. At a time in life when most people act like they should be winding down, she was just getting started. There was so much life and spirit in her that just standing with her gave me a feeling of excitement and awe.

Anna worked on her hopelessness about finding a new relationship. She felt that because she had had no relationship before the one with her husband, she had not had a chance to find out what life is. She said that in order to be in love with someone, she had to attract them and that she couldn't imagine anyone being attracted to her. Anna said that she needed someone who would appreciate her inner self.

In this statement we can see that she was dreaming about someone, either an internal part or an external person, who would be attracted to and appreciate her. We also see that she didn't identify as an attractive person who can be appreciated. Her statement that she couldn't imagine someone like that was the beginning of a new pattern. Somewhere inside, she was dreaming about her attractiveness, but something stopped her from identifying with it and having her dream of relationship.

As Anna spoke about getting married at 14,1 suddenly said, "That's when the dreaming stopped. You got into a stable relationship that was supported by the mainstream, and then you no longer had the possibility of even dreaming about how fulfilling relationships could be." She burst into tears and said "Yes." I was surprised at how deeply my statement had affected her. I started wondering about the importance of the experience that she had missed: dreaming about relationships to find out what life is about. Without the dreaming process, she was in a desperate and hopeless situation. She felt that she had lost the possibility of being in a relationship where she was appreciated for her inner self instead of being in a relationship that was bound by family and cultural duty.

As the work continued, Joe and I expressed our attraction to and awe of Anna. She became intrigued with the idea of finding a foreigner with whom she could have a relationship. We can guess that an actual relationship with a foreigner would help her experiment with new patterns for relationships by freeing her from cultural expectations. Early on in the session she had said that she wanted to be loved for her inner self. Having a relationship with the foreign part of herself could help her explore the less conventional aspects of her inner life and support her relationship to herself.

Identity as a force against the dreaming process

In everyday life we are often held in by our normal identities. We have an impulse, or we think something, but don't say it because it is outside of who we are or what we usually do. The concept of who we are serves both as a container out of which we act and as a trap. We are trapped into believing that we are who we think we are. When I saw Andrea Courvoisier's picture ^ccBeyond the Framework of Oppression" (at the beginning of this article), I suddenly understood this concept better. A lizard with a nose ring was outside anything I had ever experienced. It impacted me on two levels. The lizard itself, with her nose ring and knowing look in her eye, went outside of the "normal" bounds of a lizard. I also projected onto lizards that they are not easy to domesticate and humanize. For me, to be a lizard is to be free of human identity; a state of just being and following nature and dreaming. I thought that if I could be this lizard I would be free to live aspects of my dreaming process that are not available to me now.

The dreaming process can take you out of your normal identity, and put you in touch with

something numinous and beyond the framework of oppression. Animals are often seen as aspects of shamanism. They are models for new dreaming. With this model the world becomes limidess and identity becomes fluid. One moment one could be a child, a lizard, a child-lizard or a shaman. In a way there is no limit to the possibilities inside of you. Contact with the mythical or dreaming process reminds you that while your personal difficulties may be imposing, you are bigger than either your identity or your problems. In fact, even though difficulties seem devastating when you are dealing with them, your problems are a way to get into the river of dreaming. From the perspective of our normal identities, most of us would like to live peaceful and relatively problem-free lives. From the perspective of our dreaming process, problems open up a world of possibility.

A friend of mine recently was at the death of her mother. She said it was difficult as long as she focused on the struggle that her mother was having as her body fought with death. But when she found herself focusing on the peace and love that her mother was experiencing, she felt it was an ecstatic experience for everyone there. For days afterwards she was left with this ecstatic feeling.

Wholeness vs. dreaming

What effect does focusing on dreaming have on clients, the world, or the outcome of therapeutic work? Models and goals shift according to the situation (see Goodbread in this issue). They depend on the times, the interaction, and indeed, the dreaming itself in the moment.

One common goal for therapy is wholeness. Within this model, the therapist's job is to help the client discover the various parts of her wholeness and to integrate and live it. Another goal is to bring unconscious material to consciousness. These models suggest that there is something you are trying to discover, rediscover or attain—a final goal, end, or enlightenment. These models are useful. They motivate us to tackle difficult territory—to go further into experiences we find frightening or challenging. It is exciting to see the quest for wholeness as a way to get into the dreaming process, like the doorway leading, in Mindell's metaphor, to the river of the Tao. The danger of this goal is that wholeness is state-oriented, as if wholeness were a state out there that one only has to discover. It implies that one is not quite whole or "in order" and needs to be "fixed." It is interesting that once people get into a dreaming experience, they commonly feel more whole, even as the quest for wholeness as a goal drops away.

The dreaming process is always changing and progressing. There is no state of wholeness to attain. Although it might be the dreaming process to seek wholeness, there is a danger of making wholeness into a program, therefore missing other aspects of the dreaming process which could, in the next moment, call for one-sided-ness!

Enlightenment may be a momentary event that happens when one joins the dreaming process, rather than a state that one attains and retains. One never knows what or who or where the Tao will be. The dreaming process is always happening in different ways, so enlightenment is always at our finger tips if we can use our awareness to unfold our experiences. The notion of wholeness can be static and may depress the spirit of limitless possibility. As we saw in our first example, even depression holds a world of dreaming.

Unfolding the dreaming process

In another workshop, Joe and I worked with a woman whom I will call Mary. She had a rare form of lung cancer which was diagnosed too late to treat. About nine months earlier the doctors had given her a couple of months to live. Mary was a nun who had always worked energetically with poor people and had eagerly been training to take over a huge project in Africa working with 2000 slum and street children. Just as she was about to take up her post, she fell ill. She started the session by telling us a dream in which she went into a house to seek rest. She walked into the living room where a fire took up one whole wall of the room. It was banked and covered with slack.¹ She went upstairs to the bedroom to rest and found that the floor was gone. It had been burned away by the fire, so she went back downstairs. She asked the question: why was the caretaker building up the fire, considering it was burning the house?

Mary went on to talk about how on one hand she felt ready to die, while on the other she felt there was so much to do with her life. She said: It's not a time to die. I'd been preparing (for the project in Africa) and suddenly the door was closed in my face. It looks like I will never be allowed to go back... I am being called in a new direction. God has other plans for me. It's just like a full stop.

She clapped her hands together showing the finality of it. Just as she finished saying this, a window slammed shut and its handle fell into the locked position. It was an eerie synchronicity to have the window slam shut just as she was talking about having the door shut in her face. For that moment the window was the vehicle of dreaming, expressing it in movement. We guessed that focusing on and unfolding that dynamic would take us further into the dreaming process.

We role-played the scene between her normal identity, which had lots of energy and plans for big things, and the figure that shut the window in the room and the door in her description. As the role-play unfolded, the figure who slammed the door became God, who had other plans for her. God wanted her to sit with the big fire inside of her and not do anything.

She then sat in the middle of the room without moving. We all sat with the conflict between doing something and just sitting with that conflict. It was a relieving experience to be there with her.

There is a koan in this revelation. Mary said that people had commented that they had gotten more from her since her illness, and that just being with her and not doing anything was healing. After her work she sat down in the circle again, and the most amazing thing happened. Members of the group got up and honored her, sitting in front of her quiedy then moving away. There was a deep reverence in the room. One can conclude that this experience of sitting with the fire and not doing anything was one that was needed in the group and in many cultures. It is something most of us feel far away from. One can see from this work how these mythical or long-term processes give us contact with those aspects of ourselves which are developing over our lifetime.

We might wonder if this was Mary's work or the group's. From one point of view it was Mary's personal process. After all, it is her life that is being interrupted. But, with the window shutting in the wind and the impact that it had on the group afterwards, one could guess that there is a line where personal dreaming stops and collective dreaming starts.

Conclusion

Many people experience process work as something that they know or once knew and which they lost or forgot. Some people say that they feel like they have come home. For some time I thought that this was because many of us experience process work as a safe haven where all aspects of ourselves are accepted, including aspects which we ourselves don't accept. Perhaps another reason is that we are renewing contact with our own dreaming process or that of the collective. This makes us feel the connection to something essential in ourselves, something deeper, larger and more eternal than our normal identities, and restores contact with the hope, magic and numinosity to life.

In Western culture the consensus reality model for experience says that what is provable, feelable, seeable, and concrete is real and the rest is merely one's imagination. Contrary to process work, in this model what is in one's imagination is neither real nor of any substantial importance. This background in which process work was born makes it seem somewhat radical compared to some other psychotherapeutic schools. A process worker needs the skills and tools which help unfold the dreaming process, but more impor-tandy he needs love. Against this background of consensus reality, it is almost impossible to support dreaming, especially if you are the dreamer. Therefore the therapist's love for the client is very important, as well as her love for trouble, mystery, magic, and the unknown.

This is not to say that the consensus view is not important in certain situations. For example, most of us would prefer not to go to a surgeon who is more interested in our dreaming process than the mechanics of our body. However, most of us would like our surgeon to have an interest in our individual experience and to treat us as someone with a dreaming process instead of just a mechanical body.

The concept that life's meaningfulness ultimately comes from living our dreaming processes instead of only from our outer achievement relieves the tension of having to perform and watch as the value of each achievement fades with time. The point of process work

is to help us have the awareness, love and courage needed to live the dreaming process. It is a freeing experience that makes the world a place of almost unending possibility.

Note

1. Slack is a mixture of coal fragments, dust and dirt that remains after screening coal.

Reference

Mindell, Arnold. River's Way: The Process Science of the Dream-body. London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Kate Jobe is a movement specialist who is researching the relationship of movement to psychotherapy. She teaches process work throughout the world. Kate is a founder of Lao Tse Press and tends to a large part of her dreaming in the garden.