A 5 Day Hybrid Leadership Development Intensive for Facilitators, Coaches, Community Builders and Corporate Leaders
Swimming Upstream in the mainstream demonstrates how Arnold Mindell’s last book, The Second Training for Leaders, summarizing his lifelong work, creates a universal wholistic frame for individuals and communities to develop their own awareness practices to develop agility and fluidity to facilitate conflicts, relate creatively to health challenges and bring flow to processes that are stuck.
We all live within the mainstream, whether we agree with its norms, try to adapt to them, or struggle against them. Every day, we meet expectations about who we should be, how we should act, and what is considered successful or acceptable. These expectations also appear inwardly, as self-criticism, tension, body symptoms, relationship conflicts, and even in our dreams.
Over time, each of us develops ways to cope with these pressures. Often, we try to push the tension away or repress it for as long as possible. Process Work understands the disturbances we meet on this path not only as problems to solve, but also as signals pointing toward something deeper in us.
Process Work helps us follow these signals through dreams, body symptoms, relationship tensions, and world conflicts. It teaches us to listen to what disturbs us, switch sides, unfold what is hidden, and discover the deeper pattern trying to emerge.
The Second Training was Arnold Mindell’s last book, written near the end of his life. In it, he brings together the essence of his life’s work and shows how our disturbing, unexpected, or “secondary” experiences are not separate fragments. They form a whole.
When we follow these experiences with awareness, they can reveal our individual wholeness. And, seemingly paradoxically, they can also show us that we are part of something larger: our relationships, our communities, life on earth, and the universe at large.
Join us for this year’s annual Deep Democracy Institute Intensive in Tangier, Morocco, where we will study and practice the Second Training approach. Together, we will explore Process Work as a living awareness practice — a kind of Big TOE, or Theory of Everything — one that brings together dreams, body experience, relationships, conflict, nature, science, and spirit.
The Intensive is a training event and at the same time action research experiment for creating alternative narratives for individuals, teams and communities.
We use aspects of Process Work to demonstrate and practice how the discipline of differentiating the Process-oriented Awareness Modes including multi-dimensional Process Work rank awareness modes can change perspectives, narratives and outcomes of community work.
We practice the use of the essence level when facilitating escalation, polarizations and hotspots. Our focus is on dropping personal history, and facilitating from the ground we stand on up.
This is not just a course—it is an immersive experience designed for individuals who feel an inner calling to explore these themes, regardless of their current life situation. It is for those seeking a deeper sense of wholeness within themselves and a way to apply that wholeness to building stronger communities and facilitating conflict resolution at all levels.
The Intensive follows a Process Work Clinic format, developed and co-facilitated by Ellen and Max Schupbach. It brings together a dynamic mix of seasoned Process Work Diplomats, advanced learners, and newcomers, creating a living co-learning experience where a unique culture of collaboration emerges differently each year. This evolving process adapts to each group and environment, leading to powerful, inspirational experiences that are shaped by those who participate.
