This Year’s FOCUS
This year’s learning focus is on learning and applying the specific Process Work interventions in various contexts. It will include working on diverse epistemologies - various ways in which different cultures create and manage knowledge and the resulting worldviews.
Our Intensive Courses are full immersion courses, designed to create a lived experience of the Deep Democracy paradigm, which states that our inner lives mirror the processes of the world at large, and vice versa.
In order to understand and interact – facilitate – both, we need to develop different knowledge systems or awareness tools.
In this course, we will show how to use Mindell’s three level approach consistently, and how it can be integrated into diverse global knowledge systems.
The course will include some mini lectures for background, however the main focus will be on hands on experience and practice.
This year, we are excited to study and practice in depth the skills and art of “Process Work Unfolding”. We will work with unfolding individual processes, relationship and community conflicts, and political and geopolitical polarizations.
Process Work Unfolding – the most important term for practitioners and learners of Arnold Mindell’s Process Work and Deep Democracy paradigm. Unfolding has become a buzz word these last years, frequently used as a synonym to Unpacking. Process Work Unfolding refers to a skillset of using precise and specific awareness interventions to use disturbances and conflicts as portals to a parallel world, a slight altered state, where radical new perspectives, insights and solutions become a lived experience. Compare this to a lucid dream in the daytime that sheds light on aspects of the conflicts and problems previously in the dark. These portals offer themselves in moments of slightly altered states, for example heated group conflict, unintended communication between rigidified positions, and other disturbances and conflicts, including body symptoms.
With this radically new perspective, one perceives a hidden cohesion, a potential, that if used becomes the emerging future so to speak. This leads organically to equally radical, surprising and innovative solutions.
The real power of this intervention lies in not having to control or calm down participants, or force them into a linear rational discourse, but use the slightly altered states that are present to facilitate the awareness of the participating parties.
Mastering “Unfolding” allows us to bring out the depth of roles and ghostroles in group processes to make the meaning of numinous moments of coolspots (temporary resolutions) accessible to the entire group.
In this way, the touching moments in groups and relationships do not remain momentary experiences of group cohesion only; they also bring a collective insight that can be used in ongoing transformation by the group and its members. “Unfolding” allows us to facilitate challenges without having to rely on rational linear discourse and conversation alone. It can be applied to de-escalate heated and violent conflicts, and to assist facilitators to release fear-based control of group behavior.
The diverse ways in which we “know” and use this diverse knowledge inside of ourselves forms the foundation upon which these awareness tools can be learned and implemented. That is why all of our learning efforts will include ongoing inner work/play components.
