My name salts gossip at VIP cocktail parties to which I am not invited. Some folks think my theories false. He is one strange puppy, they say. To which I say, I searched, I wandered, I wondered, I studied. I stumbled, I got back up. I listened to wise men and wiser women. A few fools, too. I have thought about stuff. A lot.
From This Week magazine . August 11, 1993. – JDW
Everything is real to the people who believe it. – Dr. Arnold Mindel
ARNY MINDELL & PROCESS WORK
The body wants to dream… to live at the edge of the unknown. It wants challenge, risk, personal power and freedom. The body seeks danger in order to become itself.
Who is Dr. Arnold Mindel, the founder of Process Work?
Is Process-oriented psychology, this dreambody stuff, the greatest thing since sliced Id? Or, is Process Work just New Age mumbo jumbo?
Who knows what makes sense anymore?
The times, they are a changin’. We must adapt or perish. We must leave behind old ways. We must evolve.
We must break on through to the other side.
Arny Mindel is pointing a way and holding the door open for us to follow.
Congratulations! You’re sick… Illness seems chaotic and meaningless, if we do not notice the many signals and symptoms beforehand. When we investigate illness, madness or insanity, what at first appears to be turbulence, seems highly ordered.
Arny Mindel, Ph.D., is an American, a Portlander, an MIT-trained physicist, and by all standard indicators, a very bright guy.
Today, Arny is a Jungian analyst and an international leader in conflict resolution, a field where he puts his process to work by taking relationship therapy to a grand scale. For Mindel, family counseling means helping all peoples to get along peacefully and collaboratively.
He’s the author of thirteen books, the latest entitled RIDING THE HORSE BACKWARDS. The Process Work Center of Portland offers a five-year, accredited by the state of Oregon, program leading to a master’s degree in Process Work (M.P.W.) The Global Process Institute, soon to be located on the Oregon coast at Yachats, serves as an international peace center, offering “a spiritual warrior’s boot camp,” as well as The Lava Rock Clinics for people afflicted with chronic physical symptoms.
Twentysome years ago, a student of dreams, Arny Mindel found himself lured by an idea: Illness is a meaningful expression of the unconscious mind.
Physical symptoms, relationship difficulties, social tensions, group conflict, all experiences, Mindel came to believe, when approached with respect and curiosity, lead inevitably to personal or collective growth.
Mindel’s genius was two-fold.
First, he rejected the Cartesian dichotomy, which, as you all remember, is the separation by Western science of the mind and the body into two separate units.
Think of your car as your body and you, the driver, as your brain. Which made it easier for the medical practitioners, then working with leeches, and automobile mechanics, then working with oxen, to focus on a particularly profitable speciality.
Secondly, all language is basically mumbo-jumbo backed up by regional consensus. Arny suggested, since no separation exists between your body and your mind, and we all know something else is going on inside, let’s call that third entity, the DREAMBODY.
Dreambody is Mindel’s metaphor for an intentional consciousness which expresses itself in all sorts of personal ways, through dreams, illness, body movements, relationship difficulties, self-abuse, etc. Mixed messages, accidents, twitches, whatever. Signals.
I have a companion, a person trying to get my attention and it is me, Arny seems to say. We had better listen to the signals and become aware of what they mean.
“We made discoveries like antibiotics, surgery, physical advances. But, from the experiential point of view, there is no mind and no body,” explains Mindel. “There’s only your experience and the process of that experience. So, you wake up in the morning and you had a dream, but that dream is a body experience still.
“It’s only after your first cup of coffee, you can break the two things up and say, ‘Oh, my body had a stomach ache and it’s interesting, I dreamt such and such last night.’ There’s really one process but we don’t usually work with experience. So, we break those processes down and then are amazed we have to put them back together again.”
In process work, Mindel does not reduce what is happening to something else; rather, he encourages the happening to unfold itself. He works with the process, intuitively following the signals, so all can be self-explanatory.
Process work takes the dream, body problem, relationship difficulty and develops methods for unfolding these events.
“In the process-oriented view, if someone comes in and says they’ve been abducted by aliens, I would ask them what the aliens are like,” Arny says. “And the reason for that is to find out what part of themselves they split off and made alien. And what part of themselves can be used in every day life.
“I deal with everything as if it’s the client’s reality. That sounds like the right approach. It’s real for the client. But there’s a step between dealing with something if it’s real for the client, and dealing with it, with a belief everything the client says is reality. Because a lot of things people say are not consensus reality.
“Consensus reality means everybody’s reality. It is no more real than anything else, it’s just that the differentiation is important.”
Is consensus reality accurate?
“Everything is real to the people who believe it,” says Arny.
“We don’t deal with what is absolutely real because there’s no way of finding that out. Instead we try to find out how to make things useful. A different paradigm. Like alchemy. You put something in the pot and you cook it and wait until it becomes helpful.”
Process work depends upon the situation.
“Say we work with an individual, and a doctor is working on a tumor,” Arny offers. “And the doctor thinks the patient’s tumor is going to kill her. We don’t necessarily focus on whether the tumor is going to kill her or not, but how she experiences that tumor. We work with the experience of that tumor and almost always it turns out to be something very energetic. Something very useful.”
A terrifying symptom is usually your greatest dream trying to come true… When a person goes into the experience, it’s almost never illness, but some intense process trying to happen.
“Let’s say she’s afraid the tumor is going to explode in her chest,” Arny continues. “Very frequently, it turns out the person isn’t explosive enough. If you help people work with their experience of what’s happening, the experience is relieved and sometimes even the symptoms get better. We try to find out how people experience things and work with that experience. We cook the experience, so to speak.”
The world is his kitchen. Mindel’s individual practice is overshadowed by his breakthrough efforts with groups, from families to nations. Mindel, in association with his partner, colleague, co-author, wife and “teacher of loving” Amy has resolved conflict around the world, from South Africa to Moscow, Belfast to Tel Aviv.
“The discovery was, if you work with somebody as an individual, their problems can be taken care of temporarily,” Mindel says. “But then they go out into the real world. Most psychotherapists are not dealing with real world problems.
“What good does it do whether you have some self knowledge if you’re living in a war zone?,” Arny muses.
“Let’s say we’re sitting in Belfast and working with one of the terrorist groups who are meeting with us against the better judgement of the rest of their compatriots. Terrorists are not supposed to meet together. One of them says he can’t wait to kill the people who killed his father.
“A priest sitting with us doesn’t have the process-oriented view and says, “Oh, you don’t really want to kill the man who killed your father.” And the terrorist starts smiling.
Obviously, the terrorist would be pleased to kill. Mindel tried the process-oriented view.
“We say, ‘Well, how does it feel? How do you experience wanting to kill the man who killed your father? Why do you want to do that?’
“The man says, ‘Do you know what revenge is like?’ I say something like, ‘Well, I know a little bit about revenge. There’s people I don’t like.’ And the man says, ‘If you’ve just seen your father shot by other people, you just want to kill them.’ And I say, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, I can’t blame you. I do see how you feel.’
“Suddenly, the man says, ‘You mean, you really understand me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I can fully understand that.’ This is a really true story, this happened last summer to us. This man says, ‘Gee, you know, revenge isn’t all that good. I’d like to use my energy for something besides just revenge. It’s a horrible life, like an addiction, wanting revenge.’
“And the guy actually changed.”
There’s an ancient truth in this country: people don’t change. Can’t change. Mindel says people ARE changing. CAN change. SHOULD change. WANT TO change. NEED TO change.
“People say people don’t change because everybody is trying to change them,” Mindel explains. “But, if you try to understand people, then they change. It’s a different thing. If you try to change somebody, you’re going against them and they solidify in their position. If you try to get deeper into what someone feels, then change can happen.
Global conflict resolution begins at home, within each of us individually to the degree we can be aware, inwardly at peace, and courageous enough to bring forth our rightful eldership. The whole world is within each of us.
“Before the L.A. riots, we had a conference on racism in Oakland. Half the group was made up of African-Americans and the other half was made up of European-Americans and everybody else in there. Hispanic people. Latinos. Native Americans. I don’t know who all. The conference had a rapid and violent beginning when some Black people stood up and started screaming at a White man. “We hate you guys. We don’t like you. We don’t think you understand us.”
“The White people said, ‘Well, we don’t want to have to deal with you as long as you’re screaming at us so much.’ And so things started escalating.
I have this idea about getting to know somebody instead of trying to change them. To the Blacks, I said, ‘Tell us more. Tell us what it’s like. Explain. Most European-Americans don’t know what it’s like to be a minority group.’
“And they started talking and they started crying. Then they started wailing. And they wailed so hard and so long, people were so touched, the whole group actually came together. That conference had about 200 people in it. And, you know, four days later, Oakland was the only essentially black city in California which didn’t riot when the rest of state was rioting. The rest of the country.
“When you see conflicts resolve, like the one I just talked about in Oakland, process makes sense. When people get together and don’t kill each other afterwards, that’s a pretty mainstream phenomenon.
The fight isn’t over the last ten percent of the old growth forest. The fight is over the last ten percent of our own indigenous psyche. It’s not just the trees that are at stake. It’s the nature of the people. People have forgotten to communicate with nature. It’s not just the trees that are dying, it’s part of ourselves.
In Native American lore, one brave always needed to be different.
“The most unusual person in the tribe was not called crazy,” Mindel explains. “He was just called somebody who rode on the horse backwards. He balanced the rest of the tribe.
“Amy and I called our book, Riding The Horse Backwards because picking up body signals and taking them seriously, listening to your dreams, Arny Mindel explains. “All of this is really, in a way, riding the horse backwards for the American culture.”
Facing south on a northbound nag, Mindel balances the rest of the culture by taking inner wisdom seriously.
Our tribe surely needs this brave man.
Your face always breaks out before the big dance, right? Isolated coincidence, right? The doctors tell you it’s too much oil in your glands or something. They give you a prescription for DR. KNOXALL’S SPECIAL FLESH-TONE FORMULA 44 and tell you to rub some 44 on the horn growing at the end of your nose.
Wrong. You’re probably scared to ask the pretty girl to go with you. All the zit cream in the world ain’t going to process that problem.
Bob Dylan, rebel with applause, sees the celebration of his first album of protest songs turned into a telethon for public TV. Zimmerman’s Kids never trusted a thirtieth anniversary.
Dysfunction is probably functional. It’s just another function in process work.
“We don’t use the word ‘dysfunctional.’ I understand why people use the word dysfunctional,” Mindel continues, “but I don’t think it helps people much.
“What you’re calling a dysfunctional city and a dysfunctional government in Portland and in Oregon and in the United States, that means essentially a government which works on cause and effect. If something is wrong, you try to fix it. If there is going to be a riot, you do everything so the riot doesn’t happen. You call more police. You get more protection. That’s dysfunctional.
“In other words, a dysfunctional government or a dysfunctional family represses its problems. It doesn’t get into the problems and find out more about them.
“That’s the dysfunctional family. That’s dysfunctional government. Repress all the problems and try to cover them up so that they don’t exist. And then be surprised at a later date when a riot breaks out.”
If you’re okay, and I’m okay, and everything else is screwed, are we really okay?
“I don’t feel okay if everybody else actually isn’t okay. That’s one of the reasons I not only work with individuals and work with myself, but I also work with large organizations, with cities and various factions around the world.
“You may not be able to directly impact the situation in Somalia. But you sure could do a lot in Portland. And that’s a good place to begin. Right locally. Right at home in Portland.
What Mindel says rings so true, so wise. But, we’re busy, there’s eight hours of sports to watch on Sunday on television. Where’s the process in that? What’s that doing to help Somalia? Or myself?
“Take a good look at the football game you’re going to spend eight hours watching and notice what it is you’re most excited by,” Arny suggests. “The guy who catches that ball, the heroic people and then you should go further than watching that football game. You should say to yourself, “Maybe I, too, could be a hero. I want to be a hero. I’m not doing it, I’m just watching television.’
Over the edge is rarely what you think. Does getting over the edge requires a leap of faith?
“I hope your readers know what the word “edge” means. Edge means essentially there’s something happening in you and in your environment which you don’t want to admit and which you’re not allowing yourself to identify with.”
It’s a barrier. A blockade to your full potential.
“It takes a leap of faith to get over an edge. It takes a lot of courage. But, you increase your identity.
The ecological impact of process work. It’s personal and it’s global. When it’s grounded.
“Some of the work we do with Native people. We’ve done a lot with African Shamans, Australian Aborigines, and also native Americans. It’s hard to do large group processes without bringing the environment in.
In our large group process work, and organizational work, sometimes we have somebody speak as if they were part of the environment. Like the trees. And say, “Don’t forget me! I’m thirty. I’m dying. Nobody is thinking about me! All you guys are doing is thinking about your own stuff all the time. You’re forgetting the world you live in. And when the world you live in, around you, starts to die, all your greatest ideas and expectations and all that stuff is going to die, too.”
“It’s scary. Actually, You must experiment with being yourself. Where does process work stand, does it have a position on Christianity? Is God within? Or do we talk about spirits? I know the Shamanism is there, Buddhism is there.
There are different forms of process work. Process Work looks one way in Japan and looks another way in Poland. And another way in South Africa. So, I’d hate to say what people believe. Everybody should be free to believe what they want. But I myself see that, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like a Christian. Sometimes I feel like a Jew. Sometimes like a Muslim. Sometimes I feel like a Native American. And I’m sort of tired of having to belong to one thing. Because my feelings don’t. Sometimes I love Jesus and sometimes Jesus doesn’t seem to be as helpful as Yahweh (?) Sometimes neither seems to be as helpful as the spirits of nature. In a process-oriented view of things, people have the religion they believe in a given moment.”
The thing which seems to be the enemy is almost always the greatest ally. Congratulations you’re sick. If you ever come across a small pain, hold onto it, it is a magical treasure. Can you tell me what’s going on there?
“The thing you’re most afraid of, the pain you’re getting, that’s like signals from an aspect of yourself, which you just don’t know. You interpret it as pain. Or you interpret it as a disease. You interpret it as a bad thing. You go to a doctor and you get some medicine, some aspirin, to knock it out but it doesn’t go away, usually, so easily. If you get to know these things a little better. You listen to the pains. Talk to them. And they can become the next really big step in your personal development. Make life a lot more exciting. A lot less boring.
Like a man who I used to work with last year some time, who had constant attacks of angina pectoris. Heart problems. I asked him what it was like and he said stabbing. If he would just stab things more himself. And listen to these pains in his chest. That was really quite amazing. He said as he started to stab things more, what he would do is he would be more aggressive and less peaceful. And if he was more aggressive and less peaceful he would become a social activist and stand up and talk about poverty. The problems of poverty in Portland. That man has become one of the more important social activists in Portland.
Of which there are too few.
“There are too few of them,” Mindel agrees. “His angina, and the nice thing about that story is his heart isn’t well, but his pain has disappeared. He feels a lot better.
“Though his heart may be slowly improving, he no longer has any pain or taking pain medication. His life is a lot richer.”
More heartful.
Where are you going next?
“More research on near-death experiences. That’s one aspect of process work. We have a clinic on the coast, Yachats. Where people who are real sick and dying can come a couple of times a year. And work together with a large community. We’ve had a lot of good experiences. And learned a lot about near death experiences. That’s one aspect.
“Another is learning how to get along with large, multi-cultural conflicts and problems around diversity. Those two areas where I myself am going at the moment. My wife Amy and I, I should say.
Where’s trust in this relationship? If I’ve done the process work on myself, I’m processing. I’m trying to resolve this conflict, I’m trying to collaborate. Not compromise. Collaborate. How do I know that other guy is processing as nicely as I am? Can I trust him? Do I have to trust him?
“No. You don’t. You needn’t trust someone in conflict work or in relationship work, especially. That’s not as important as knowing exactly what you’re doing and believing in the process that’s happening to you. If you really go into that deeply, and try to follow the other person’s process as well, there are very few relationships which don’t end so that each person feels enriched by them. Trying to trust somebody is like trying to add color. You don’t need those things. You need awareness instead.
Awareness means picking up signals that are happening inside you.
“Process Work is based upon the concept of Tao. But you’ve got to find out what’s happening and then try to comprehend it and go along with the Tao. Then change happens.”
The mind/body dichotomy. Then we’re up to a triad, right? There’s a mind, body and a soul, let’s say. Then Mindel shows up and says, “Wait, whoa. There’s only one thing here.’
“The idea there’s only one thing, namely process, is an idea that goes way back to before Descartes. Where all these splittings happened in the West.”
I can’t write about Descartes. He’s a French guy.
But I must. The goal – remember – is to help people.
(1995)