Andrea Courvoisier

When my mother died in 1991, at 53 years of age, her body was immediately taken to the department of forensic medicine. My family couldn’t see her body until many days later, at the funeral. Why did my mother’s death become a case for criminal investigation? She wasn’t murdered, and my family had expected and feared her suicide for many years. Yet I was told that the forensic examination was a routine procedure since the exact cause of death was still unknown. Read more ›

Alexandra Ariadni Vassiliou, Ph.D.

In September 1996, I was invited to teach a series of conflict resolution classes to a group of Muslim women in Athens, Greece. This group was part of an educational program funded by the European Union and aiming at providing training and skills to people who are excluded from the ”job market.” There are four different groups of people in these programs: ethnic minorities, immigrants, people recently released from jail, and people recently released from psychiatric hospitals. It costs the government more to support these groups of people through welfare than to train them to join the work force, so the European Union now provides training programs for these groups. Read more ›

Gary Reiss

Many years ago, I had a clinical supervisor who believed that couples with children should always try to work out their problems and stay together. A few years after we finished our work together, I went back to her for further supervision. She had been learning some new methods and her basic approach had changed. The new rule of thumb was that if couples weren’t happy, they should split up. Read more ›

Silvia Camastral

The Itch of Creation

In the beginning there was silence
vastness of quiet then–a spark
a charm, an electric impulse–the itch!
The universe convulsed itself
dynamic electric explosions
firing of neurons contracting and convulsing
the universe body enchantment
new creation! Read more ›

Pierre Morin, M.D.

Modern medical culture

Today’s complex medical culture demands a change in how we perceive illness. Our subjective experience of symptoms and disease is predominantly influenced by social or cultural values. Modern liberalism has brought immense progress in actual social conditions, including economic, material and political freedom, as well as the spread of democracy as a political structure. One pillar of this progress is individualism, which focuses on material and economic measures. Within this Zeitgeist, or timespirit (the sum of the current valid values of the local culture), health care has also concentrated on treating the individual, with enormous success. However, I believe that a future view of health will encompass mental, social, and spiritual well being. This expanded view will move beyond the individual to incorporate interpersonal relationships, community, culture, and spirit as intricate parts of disease causation, as well as the concept of salutogenesis, the generation and maintenance of health. Read more ›

Maurice Shaw

Today when I woke up there was music in my head. Did it have any meaning? Or was it just lost chords echoing in my mind, the mind of a one-time musician who sometimes longs to return to simpler days?

I left school with a degree in music. I taught music for a number of years, and also performed and wrote music. Then changes happened in my life, and I took off on another career path. But I have always carried with me a love, appreciation and fascination with music. Of more recent times I have studied process work, and in this article I try and combine two loves that I have. Read more ›

An Interview with Arnold Mindell

Interviewed by Joy Gates

This interview was first published in Dream Network Journal Volume 18, Number 4, “Preparing for the Millennium.” It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author Joy Gates and editor, Roberta Ossana.

Foreword: Have you ever had the experience of reading a book that changed your life? A book that seemed to call forth spring rain upon your quickening seed? Arnold Mindell’s book The Shaman’s Body: A New Shamanism for Transforming Health, Relationships, and the Community was such a book for me. I was so excited by the vision expressed in The Shaman’s Body that I read all of his books to which I could gain access. The more I read, the more I felt that Arny Mindell’s perspective was indeed in resonance with another book whose message had changed my life, a Chinese book of ageless wisdom, the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu. In fact, process work, as Arny shares on page 22 of his book Sitting in the Fire has roots in Jungian psychology, physics and Taoism. The Taoist view of life assumes that the way things are unfolding contains the basic elements necessary for solving human problems. (See the end of this article for other important process work concepts.) Read more ›

Lane Arye

Some people are hard to deal with. You try to relate with them normally, but they just will not or cannot do the same. They may be your clients, your co-workers, friends, enemies, members of your family or people you encounter on the street. They may be really depressed, psychotic, in altered states, near death, stubborn, dogmatic, aggressive or drunk. You try to make contact with them. But sometimes it is so difficult that you throw your hands into the air or roll your eyes to the back of your head or silently wish you could avoid them in the future. Read more ›

Perhaps you are familiar with the Jain¹ story “The Five Blind Men and the Elephant,” which takes place in a small village in India. When I recently rediscovered this story, I found that through time my memory of it had changed; I had even forgotten parts of it. I was delighted to go back to the story itself and to research the philosophy behind it and finding that my understanding reflected only a small part of the story and its message. Let me recount it again. In the village, where people had heard of elephants but no one had yet seen one, there was great excitement on the day the elephant came. People crowded to the center of the village in their curiosity to find out more about this strange animal. There were five blind men living in this village, and since it was such a big event, someone invited them to come and touch the elephant so they would also know what it was like. When they went to the center of the village, people moved aside and gave them access to the elephant. Read more ›

Research in Process Work

• Joe Goodbread, Process Work Research at the Crossroads PDF
• Lee Spark Jones, Feasting on Possibility PDF
• Kate Jobe, Sit-ups and Paradigm Crunches PDF
• Reini Hauser, Heroin Addiction and Altered States PDF
• Sara Halprin, Serendipity Doodah PDF
• Amy Mindell, A Brief Review of Recent Evolution in Process Theory PDF
• Alan Richardson and Peter Hands, Work, Vocation, and Self PDF
• Waynelle Wilder, Dream Shifts after Impact PDF
• Julie Diamond and Lee Spark Jones, Paradigms of Influence in the Process Work Approach to Multiple Role Relationships PDF
• Book review PDF
• Akira Kobayashi, Process Work and Initiation: A study of contemporary initiation in the Process Work community of Portland PDF

Editors: Joe Goodbread, Pierre Morin

Index of The Journal of Process Oriented Psychology