Dreaming Body: an Interview with Julie Diamond, Ph.D. (Part I) Til Luchau, Certified Advanced Rolfer (This interview was originally published in Rolf Lines, the professional journal of the Rolf Institute.)

Julie Diamond worked together with analyst/physicist Arnold Mindell (author of Working with theDreaming Body, The Shaman's Body, Sitting in the Fire, etc.) as one of the original founders of Process Work (or Process Oriented Psychology). In this interview, which is the first part of a longer conversation that took place on January 3rd 1999, Julie talks about some of the basic ideas behind Process Work, and gives examples of how they might be applied to working with physical symptoms or posture issues.

I began studying Process Work with Arny Mindell in the mid 1980's as a student of bodywork and body-centered therapies at the Esalen Institute. As I did, you will notice where the Process Work perspective differs from our perspective as Rolfers (for example, the emphasis on the psychological aspects of symptoms and experience), as well as the similarities we share (e.g., seeking the "self-correcting" capacity of the body). My hope is that both the differences and the similarities will prove stimulating and educational. As a Rolfer who also works as a psychotherapist, the dynamic interaction between these two viewpoints keeps me reflecting, growing, and refining my appreciation for each, in all their disparate and complimentary views,values, and methods.

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Til Luchau: So what is Process Work?

Julie Diamond: Process Work is a modality for working with people that works with the whole person, which means in the language of conventional therapy, the unconscious as well as the conscious parts. But "whole person" also means all the different arenas in which people operate and live, like relationships, body symptoms, group life and conflict, movement and physical expression, creativity, spirituality. Really it follows where people go, so it's a very broad ranging modality, but it has a very basic theoretical foundation and the same theories and methods work with all those different applications.

Til:
What are some of those basic theories?

Julie:
The basic idea behind Process Work is simple and complex at the same time. It's basically the idea that there is a "dreaming process" underlying the forms and structures of consensus reality. So behind the symptom, behind the group conflict, or behind the relationship difficulty, is a river of meaning that we call the dreaming process. It's very much in the homeopathic tradition in that the solutions themselves lie within the conflict or the problem. So that by going more deeply into it whatever it is that manifests as the problem, we connect with that dreaming process, and that dreaming process is creative, healing, helpful, more whole. Instead of just being identified with the forms and structures of consensus reality, or our problems, we also connect with a deeper level of meaning.

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Going into a Symptom

Til:
What do you mean by "going into something"?

Julie:
Well, most of life could be characterized as being aware of the troubles and the problems that are confronting us. We have a symptom, or we wake up with a dream we don't know what it means, orwe have a relationship problem, or we're not getting along with our family, or we have money problems, or we're aware of social conflicts or whatever. Getting into the flow behind these things means being able to amplify and unfold and go more deeply into those problems. Its like the Taoist idea that we are going more with it, that it is not happening to us, but we are picking up the energy and picking up the flow of what is going on and co-creating with it. And that is what it means to go into it.

Til:
I wonder about an example.

Julie:
One of the best examples that I always come back to is an example that Arny [Mindell] talks about in one of his books. He talks about the story of a young boy who came to him with a brain tumor. So that is the identified problem, and is a quite serious one. He was undergoing treatment and he had to be kept very still, and he was very depressed naturally. Anyway, he came to Arny with his mother and Arny asked him about his experience of the tumor. (This is really the key in Process Work-we don't work with the objective descriptions of what a symptom or problem is, but we work with the subjective experience of what that problem is. How you experience it is very different from how I experience it, and that's the key to unraveling that dreaming process.) So Arny asked him, "Well, what's your brain tumor like?" The boy said he had a lot of headaches. Arny went one step further with the unraveling process, again not being satisfied with the objective description of the headache, even though everybody knows what a headache is. The key is what the kid experiences as a headache, so Arny asked him, "What is it like to have a headache?" and the kid started rapping his knuckles, knocking on the chair, and said, "It's like a hammer, it's hammering." So this is now getting close to the dreaming process-this is the subjective, irrational element in the symptom. Arny said "Well, let's hammer together, let's do that." The kid was knocking, and Arny started knocking with him, going more into the symptom. The next step is to really go into it, amplifying it fully to make it global. Instead of it being manifest in one way, like for example the knocking, you could bring in other things like movement and sound and pictures. Arny brought in sounds with the knocking and asked him what the "knocker" was knocking about-were there words that went with that? The boy started to say, "Get to work, get to work!", almost like a teacher character came out as he was knocking. "Get to work, do your homework!" The kid had missed a lot of school because of this tumor. Conventional approaches to this would say that the kid needs a lot of rest, but the dreaming process or the symptom, this irrational element, was actually a "knocker" who said, "Get to work, do your homework, get back to work." The kid actually had a lot of energy that wanted to get back into life that wasn't being picked up. So Arny said to the mother, "He should be doing his homework." The mother said, "But the doctor said he should rest more and he could miss school," but the kid wanted to get back to school and do his homework! Arny said following the dreaming process could also be healing for the kid's health because it is tapping into and using his energy. The kid got better in the end. So that's an example of "getting into it."

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Symptoms as Solutions rather than Results

Til:
So, Process Work might try to find out what the symptom itself is trying to do, and encourage it to do it more.

Julie:
Yeah, there is a life in those symptoms, there is an energetic flow, and they're going towards something. It follows Jung's idea that symptoms are purposeful, heading towards something-they are not the result of neurosis but are the solution to something.

Til:
That's a big shift from, say, treatment-oriented thought that says, "Let's get rid of the symptoms."

Julie:
That's right. It's a shift that we saw from Freud to Jung. Freud saw all symptoms, whether physical or neurotic, as a result of a prior trauma. Thus, to heal the symptom you have to go back to that prior trauma, and of course Reich extended that and looked for that in the body. Jung said something very different: he said symptoms aren't the result of a trauma, they are actually trying to correct something, a trauma perhaps. Jung gave a very specific example in one of his books. He said the mother symbol in Freudian thought would be the symbol of the problem, the neurosis. He says in Jungian thought, it would be the healing archetype--that more "mothering" is needed.

Til:
I am thinking about how we do something similar in Rolfing.

Julie:
Interesting, how does that work?

Til:
Well, classically Rolfing used a lot of what we call direct techniques, which means that if something is tight or contracted we would work it in a way that would make it longer or lengthen. More recently,say in the last ten or fifteen years, many Rolfers are also using indirect techniques, which takes something tight or short more into the tightness.

Julie:
Interesting, amplifying it-the basic homeopathic thought. I guess behind it is the idea that the organism is a self-correcting system.

Til:
That's a big one.

Julie:
That's a big one, and I think Process Work is really fundamentally Taoist, in the sense that the Way (with a big W) is the way (little w). In other words, the flow of nature is a self-correcting system, if you just align yourself to nature things will heal themselves.

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Posture as an Inner Relationship Issue

Til:
Let's take something like posture or the way someone stands. Let's say a client comes in and says, "Hey, I am not happy with my posture." How would we work with that from a Process Work perspective?

Julie:
OK, that's a great example. Well, if someone comes in and has a particular posture and said they want to change it, then I think to myself that I have two clients in front to me and not just one. I have the posture that is going a particular direction, and then I have the person who is in conflict with that posture. It's like a relationship conflict. I just hold that in my mind, because working with problems you have to understand that the problem has its own direction-it's like another client that doesn't speak when it comes into the office. It is like the minority that doesn't get to say its piece.

Til:
The problem itself has a voice that may not be being heard.

Julie:
That's right, and part of what you are doing with amplifying is you're letting it speak it in its language. So what I would do would be I would actually amplify that posture, find out what is trying to happen in that posture, giving it a voice, letting it speak I don't know what would happen in that session but I can imagine saying to the person, "Well if that tension and pressure or rigidity is something you need right now, it's probably somatic because it is not conscious." It is that old psychotherapeutic chestnut that says that things somatize when they go unconscious. So helping him fight or battle more consciously, his body maybe doesn't have to do it, and it will relive the symptom. So you don't get rid of what the symptom is doing, but it doesn't necessarily have to be only that body part that is doing it.

Til:
For most bodyworkers, the idea of supporting the tight part is a big change of perspective.

Julie:
Yes, befriending what the body is doing and actually doing it for the body so it doesn't just have to be just that muscle or body that's doing it.

Til:
Now, so far we've spoken about examples of people who come in with a body symptom. In those cases, Process Work might look to help someone get in touch with the psychological processes behind the symptom.

Julie:
Yes.

Til:
What about a body symptom that is the result of an accident or trauma? Someone comes in, say, after a car accident and can't turn their head.

Julie:
Well, there are a lot of different ways to approach a symptom because there are a lot of different subjective experiences attached to that symptom. For example, some symptoms have a very overt and dramatic cause, like an accident. I would work with the accident (as well as the symptom at a later date). Something like an accident would be very exciting to work directly with, the accident and what happened, because in the language of Process Work we would say that the accident is a dreaming process, an event that was way outside of someone's control. Accidents are very frequently connected to major changes in life. We did a study on this once: when people are close to separating in a relationship, frequently accidents happen, it's really something Til, you should keep an eye on this in your practice.

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Ground of Being

Til:
I'm going to go with that for a second. It sounds like we're relating both body symptoms and their cause back to some sort of underlying meaning, or to what needs to happen in someone's life or relationships.

Julie:
Yes, I would say yes, very much like a dream. At least in our theory, symptoms and dreams are synonymous in the sense that they are expressions of the flow of life and what is trying to happen.

Til:
In Rolfing or bodywork, I think we'll often relate those kinds of issues back to the body. If someone comes in and tells a story about a relationship we'll say to ourselves, "OK, so how is that happening in the body?"

Julie:
Oh, I see.

Til:
We are doing the opposite in some ways-we look for how these issues might be reflected in someone's structure and movement, and work with them on those levels.

Julie:
I see, so in Rolfing the body is the ground of being.

Til:
Yes.

Julie:
I guess in Process Work, the body is one manifestation of being. I think dreaming is the ground of being in Process Work.

Til:
OK, so the body is one aspect of being. There's a quote from Ida Rolf, something like, "I know the body is not all there is, but that's what I can get my hands on."

Julie:
I love that quote-that helps me now I think. One of the things that we do in Process Work, is that we are trying to get our hands on dreaming!

In Part II of this interview, Julie talks about the self-correcting tendencies of the body,addictions, and the social/cultural dimensions of body symptoms.

Rolfing, Welfare Reform, Addictions, and Individual Change: an Interview with Julie Diamond, Ph.D. (Part II)

Til Luchau, Certified Advanced Rolfer

In recent years, the writings of Arnold Mindell (such as The Leader as Martial Artist, The Shaman's Body, Sitting in the Fire, etc.) have generated considerable interest in fields as diverse as organizational development and shamanism. Mindell's original work was with body symptoms and dreaming, as detailed in books such as Working with the Dreaming Body and Coma: A Key to Awakening. In this, the second part of an interview conducted on January 3rd 1999, Julie Diamond (a senior teacher of Arnold Mindell's Process Work) talks about several topics that might be interesting to practitioners who work with the body:

1. Can we really trust the natural self-correcting power of the body? What about addictions--aren't they evidence that the body's self-regulation can't always be trusted? Julie's response is that the yearning behind an addiction might be pointing toward something that is actually needed. Working on an addictive behavior might mean getting to the root of that need and addressing the yearning itself, rather than just trying to get rid of the addictive behavior. An interesting way to apply this to bodywork would be to see constrictions or structural imbalances in the same way--perhaps they are "symbols" for something that the system actually needs for balance, or inefficient attempts to get something that is needed. For instance, guiding a client farther into a collapsed pattern might reveal a need for more rest or inwardness. Could trying to release restrictions or balance the structure without investigating the processes behind those things be like simply trying to get rid of an addictive behavior? That is, such interventions are often useful, even necessary in acute cases, but they don't always address the hidden wisdom of the forces behind an imbalance or restriction .

2. The second topic we discussed here is the relationship between individual and collective change. How does the influence of culture and society affect what we are able to accomplish as practitioners working on the individual level? And, how do we enable our clients to take their changes out into their everyday lives?

Julie Diamond: Process Work is fundamentally Taoist, in the sense that the Way (with a big W) is the way (little w). In other words, the flow of nature is a self-correcting system, if you just align yourself to nature things will heal themselves.

Til Luchau: Now that's a big discussion. Some people would say, "Well, what about addictions?" Aren't addictions a time when nature seems to be going "wrong"?

Julie:
Funny that you should talk about addictions because that is my favorite topic these days. Process Work has worked a lot with addictions, especially in the last ten years or so. One of the ideas about an addiction that is often overlooked in our culture is that we forget that an addiction is a tinkering with a mood.

Til:
A tinkering with a mood?

Julie:
It is a tinkering with a mood-it is an altering of a state of consciousness. And typically, psychological thinking about addictions is colored by moral and religious systems that are really difficult. The whole thing about addictions being a sign of a personal failing or a weakness is still very much in modern psychotherapeutic approaches for addictions. So when you think about addictions, you think someone is doing all these terrible, bad things, and they are getting away from things, that they are hiding and fleeing and all that stuff. That can be true, I'm not saying it is not, but what they are also doing is they are changing their state of consciousness. So that the teleological approach, that purposive direction that Process Work would take, would be to ask as well, not just what you're fleeing, but what are you going to. What is the state of consciousness that the addiction helps you connect with? And why do you need it in your life--it is again a symbol that is trying to correct something. So if you are doing something to alter your state of consciousness, it is your normal state of consciousness that may need correcting. So one way to look at it would be that the addiction is an attempt at healing your normal state of consciousness.

Til:
So maybe the addiction is trying to go towards something that could be helpful?

Julie:
Exactly.

Til:
For example, what could someone in addictive process be trying to go toward that might be helpful?

Julie:
Well, for example, our American culture is such a work ethic culture, and there are all kinds of addictions that run counter to the American spirit, you know, like heroin, alcoholism, where people can't work, don't work, and they're relaxing into a state of stupor. That could be correcting an incredibly one-sided approach to work. It is also very individual, you would have to ask what people themselves about what they are doing. But smoking, for example, is a really big one. If you amplify the altered state that smoking produces, very often you get people in a more dreamy, drifty, state. But also it tinkers with your breathing, so you get people to amplify their experience of smoking, not by smoking incidentally, but by asking them to mimic smoking and then feel what they feel. A lot of times people will start to breath more deeply and then that produces an altered state of drifting out of focus, not being so related. This is really a very disavowed state in a culture that puts such a premium on relatedness and verbal interaction, and being ready to work, and go, and be "on." That is an example I see a lot working with people around smoking.

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Til:
How about the cultural aspect? In Process Work, how are body symptoms seen as connected to cultural issues?

Julie:
We were talking about this in regard to addictions, and everything is also related to culture. In our normal way of being (what we call in Process Work our "primary process") we get identified with certain activities and definitions of who we are: "I am this, I am that." Very often, many symptoms run counter to this definition; they are trying to complete us, make us more whole. The role of culture in this is very powerful-culture tends to support our primary definitions of who we are.

Til:
For example?

Julie:
For example, let's take the person we were talking about with the postural problem. Her culture-which I am here using to mean her subculture, her family of origin culture, the country that she is coming from, the job area that she is working in-in her culture, all that is supported is her hunched posture, in the sense that it supported her to strain and to struggle and to work hard. So shifting that is a revolutionary act because you have to go against culture and she then becomes the "relaxing one." But this "relaxing one" and her psychology are like a marginalized minority position-they don't have any support. They need an advocate, and often the therapist has to advocate for these more marginalized positions until the person's whole personality can then pick that up and support it. She is not going to find much support in the culture because she has lived and grown up in a particular culture that supports working hard and straining, struggling. And everything in her and around her is against relaxing.

Til:
We see that all the time as Rolfers, by the way. You do a beautiful session and your client is standing or moving in a more balanced way, and then they have to go right out into their lives and into the chaotic world again.

Julie:
Right, so actually working with the symptom is the quick part, that's not the part that's hard, it's integrating the changes that's harder.

Til:
Integrating the change?

Julie:
Integrating the change into everyday life means nothing less than changing culture. I'll throw a quote back at you. Arny [Mindell] said, "History happens in the body." That's actually an old idea, in terms of personal history, but the whole idea that historical struggles are in the body, not just personal history, but social struggles are deeply personal things that are found in everyday symptoms, like this person's struggle with the work ethic versus relaxing. That is an age-old social problem, you could read history books and find that dynamic happening there too.

Til:
This idea has touched me a lot. It has got me thinking that if I'm really interested in "wholism," it means more than just working on the whole body. It means moving beyond the level of just my clients' experience, too; my clients are embedded in a cultural context, and if I really want to support my clients' changes, or make a difference in their lives, it means working on the culture as well.

Julie:
That's right. I can work alone on myself in my body, but then I have to go live that body change in my personal relationships, so then I'm doing relationship work. Then I go to work, and I have to do the same thing and struggle with that in the work place and in the culture at large, and so working at all levels is really part of human change.

Til:
Lots of people, including me in the past, have said to ourselves that by helping our clients change we are working on cultural change, that working on an individual level will affect the collective level.

Julie:
I agree completely, but the person integrating that change is a collective process too. So the work changes their body, but can they maintain that change? Actually, the point isn't to maintain the change; the point is the clash of culture. In that clash of culture process lives-that's the point, you see, that's democracy. Democracy is the dialogue between positions. It's not that one position lives more than another position, it's that incredible dialogue that happens between them.

Til:
So that moment when I go out of my session so relaxed and open and connected to myself, dealing with the clash of coming back into, well...

Julie:
...a tight culture. And the dialogue between uptight work ethic and your relaxed state of mind-that for me, is the point. It is not making a change and making it stick, it's unraveling the different spirits that live in these different positions or in the culture, the spirit of work versus the spirit of relaxing. It's not even having a relaxed body that's important, it's actually the spirit of relaxed-ness, and what that is and what that means. This goes way beyond just having the body experience of it. What is it like to have a relaxed attitude of mind? Or a relaxed life, a relaxed way of relating to people? And that relaxed role interacting with the other role, meeting each other, learning about each other, having a dialogue and through that dialogue growing and challenging, developing and learningI think that's where Process Work goes.

Til:
So, I'm asking myself, as a Rolfer how might I help my clients deal with the culture, how do I help them in that dialogue?

Julie:
Well, you know, every modality has its way of doing things. In Rolfing for example, I am thinking you have a client make a lot of changes in their body, in their posture. How about giving time to process what that means for them to have such a body experience? What would it be like to live like that, how would it change their life style? How would they be political like that, for example? What would it be like to have an attitude of mind that follows this body experience? We could process the clash in a role play, and we'd come back to whatever brings that up-tight body state back, and what it would be like to integrate it.

Til:
So, in this way of thinking, the work doesn't end on the table or even in the practice room. Working this way, we help our clients find some bridge out into their life processes.

Julie:
That's important because they have to go back to work, and back to their life. That's really where these processes and structures get reinforced.

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Til:
How does Process work look at how the individual and collective levels connect, or especially, how to be effective on both levels? Or how personal change is just one facet of a continuum?

because as I became more politically active and Process Work was doing a lot more group work, I found myself thinking well what the [hell] am I doing, sitting alone one to one, talking about somebody's mother. I thought, "I can't do this." I really got to a crisis point, and so I had a really big long think and I thought what am I doing when I am working with an individual? Is it enough to work with them that they had a bad mother, or that they have trouble getting their needs met in their relationship, or whatever? I was thinking about it and I realized that actually I am not helping them with their problems. That's not enough for me, that won't do it. What I am helping them with is this: I want to help make people more capable of democracy, and that to me is my goal.

Til:
More capable of democracy?

Julie:
Democracy is a lot more than voting, and I would say that we are not really yet capable of democracy.

Til:
I imagine you are talking about things like how to include diversity

Julie:
Yeah, how to speak up, and speak out, and be open to what you yourself are thinking, and facilitate others, and be up to that immense dialogue that is democracy. Democracy for me is like the ultimate relationship work. It is divergent needs competing over world systems and scarce resources and ideological positions. It is a massive dialogue, and it requires a lot to be up to that big debate, not just shouting down your opponent, or using voting to silence one side, or being more right or wrong. It requires really being open, listening, talking, taking your position, helping the other part express its side, understanding where it's coming from, that whole thing. I feel when I am working with people, that is what I am actually trying to do--help myself and others be capable of a democratic process.

Til:
Even knowing how to be a relaxed person in this culture is an internal democratic process as well as an external democratic process.

Julie:
It's part of democracy, that's exactly right, and it's an external democratic process-we project that relaxed-ness onto minority groups-call them lazy, stupid, bad workers, that whole thing. It is totally disavowed and marginalized. It's a huge political thing to talk about relax. If white professionals talk more about the value of relaxing I think that would do a lot for racism in America, we wouldn't have to project it, we could start owning it as our problem, and not projecting it onto other nations and races and

Til:
and welfare moms.

Julie:
Exactly, that's great! Til, that's fantastic. You should do a new article: "Relaxing and Welfare Moms!"

Til:
That's what we're working on when we do it inside.

Julie:
That's right, you're working on welfare reform.

Til:
OK, Julie thank you for this conversation.

Julie:
You're welcome!

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More information about Process Work can be found at www.ProcessWork.org. Julie Diamond can be contacted at Diamond_Julie@Compuserve.com or www.juliediamond.net