I have a background in Laban Movement Analysis although in my work I am most influenced by Arny Mindell and Process Work. I feel comfortable in its paradigm that holds that there is meaning in experience, even the disturbing ones. It brings into question a model of reality that simplifies experience to right and wrong, good and bad and replaces this with an awareness model. The power to process and unfold these experiences is a fundamental power that has the potential to transform even the most difficult situations into learning experiences.
I have sought to combine my background in movement, dance and creativity with Process Work for the last 20 years. This has led me to performances created using Process Work awareness as well as influenced the way that I work with individuals and groups. I am a trainer in Process Work and have been instrumental in developing Diploma, MA, training at the Process Work Institute in Portland, OR, the certificate and diploma programs in Process Oriented Psychology Ireland and the Russian Certificate Program in Moscow, and have taught in the Laban Certification Program in Seattle, WA, and dance at Western Washington University.
I feel Process Work has given me the tools and philosophy to unfold the depths of spirit and mystery that is so important to human experience. Having worked under some pretty intense conditions in conflict situations like Northern Ireland with people in prision and with heroine addicts in India; in Russia with people who are suffering with difficulties as a reslut of cleaning up the Chernobyl accident, or with people near death, I feel has given me a perspective where, even in the most challenging situation, people come through in some pretty amazing ways. When things seem dire some small detail shows the way to the mysterious.
I find that safely embodying experience that is unknown and getting a direct physical experience of it helps make a relationship to it until it can make sense in a direct way, instead of “understanding” or interpreting it. At the right time, bringing the experience back to everyday life can help integrate it.
I teach internationally mostly with Joe Goodbread, my life partner and author of The Dreambody Toolkit, a basic introduction to Process Work and Radical Intercourse, a potent book on the relationship between client and therapist and the "mutual dreaming" that happens in that relationship.
Kate Jobe, Certified Process Worker, Registered Somatic Movement and Registered Somatic Movement Educator practices Process Work in Portland, Oregon and teaches Process Work and movement studies there and in many places in the world (see below). She is co-founder of the Process Work Institute, The Global Process Institute and Process Oriented Psychology, Ireland. Kate is the founder of the Journal of Process Oriented and Lao Tse Press which published Arny Mindell's Quantum Mind.
Kate is a Certified Laban Movement Analysts and taught LMA in the Seattle Certification Program at the University of Washington with Peggy Hackney, Martha Eddy, Pam Schick, Janice Meaden and Carol-Lynn Moore. Her first career as a dancer and choreographer led her to teach at Western Washington University where she studied and worked with Barbara Arms, Nolan Dennett and Cathy Casey among others.
In her second career as a Process Worker, Kate has traveled extensively with her partner Joe Goodbread teaching Process Work seminars and conducting special projects such as the "Chernobyl Project" where they worked in Sochi Russia with people who had cleaned up the Chernobyl disaster, and "Befriending Conflict" working with community workers from both sides of the boarder between Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland. She has spent the last 20 years integrating her previous movement experience with Process Work.
Contact with the deeper parts of myself has proven very important in the way I live my everyday life. There are a couple of ways that I can reliably find my eternal self that I do as a practice: movement practice and proprioceptive or feeling practice.
The movement practice isn't purely movement but starts with following movement in my body as it spontaniously arises. Letting my attention focus on the movements that are happening, the resistence to them and the unexpected suprises that come from them is a refreshing treat. There are some days when not much movement happens but a lot of connection happens.
The other is a feeling practice that mostly happens to me. Sometimes I am awoken in the night with a sensation in my body or sensations in my body. These can be pretty intense and at first mildly disconcerting. It started with my being awoken with a buzzing vibration in my spine. Sometimes it goes up and down my spine making it move in an undulation. At other times I have awoken with my body moving in developmental movement patterns like the head and tail relating in various ways.
Sometimes this practice is something that leads to some greater understainding of myself, a situation that's happening in my life or a profound satisfaction. It has helped with various body problems like foot pain or neck pain. I am sometimes amazed by the subtilty of the experience and the power of those experiences like the day I felt each of the vertebre in my neck and the innitiation of turning my head to the side from each of those vertebre in sequence down my neck.
Or there was the day that I felt the effect of gravity on my body, pulling me into the Earth and also felt the resistance in my muscles to that pull, a kind of holding me up. i was afraid to let go, afriad that I would loose something. I decided to just try letting go of what I could and found a freedom that I didn't recognize before.
Arny Mindell's concepts of levels of experience where there are the most subtle levels of experience at the same time that there are more CR or consensual levels of experience, have helped support my attention to these kinds of experience. I love exploring the limits of perception and noticing the differences that it makes in my life.
I'm writing about this here because I do feel that it's a difficult thing to support in oneself. There have been numerous people who I have told about these experiences and they have been relieved to know that their own such experiences are not that crazy or that there is something wrong with them. Naturally, any body experience that feels strange and is persistent and seems unwell needs medical attention. This is not a substitute for seeking porfessional help which I have from many wonderful professionals.
So that's a long winded introduction to what follows, which is some writing about some of my experiences along with some of the drawings, or writing that comes out of the movement experiences that I have been having. This will eventually move to a blog.
I drew the picture to the right after a recent movement experience. It describes an experience of a sense of connection to something that resides under the surface of the Earth. I drew it after moving in a studio where there is a loose floorboard that makes sounds like a strange harp with you walk on it. I found myself jumping, thumping, rolling, and pressing myself into the floor to relate to this sound just below the surface.
It reminds me of experience that is just outside of my awareness, just below what I am able to perceive with my mind, but my body seems to understand it and is able to relate to it.
I could say it is part of my Dreambody, my whole self. The dreambody idea is one that Arny Mindell developed in the early 1980's. It is the expression of your wholeness as it happens in you, your dreams, the world around you and in the disturbances and joys that you have.
This experience has let me to explore the relationship my feet have to the ground. I feel my lower leg involved in support and the relationship of that to my core. It is as if the Earth gently comes up to meet me from that spot just below the surface.
