|
|
Back to Articles
Review for Religious
At the Threshold of a Christian Spirituality: Ira Progoff's Intensive Journal® Method
by John McMurry, S.S.
Since 1978 I have been teaching Ira Progoff s Intensive Journal method
occasionally at weekend workshops. Dialogue House, the umbrella
organization covering all of Progoff’s works, describes his method as a
program of “professional and personal growth with a spiritual point of
view.” It is a nonanalytic means for individuals to attain two goals.
First, it enables individuals to recognize and accept the wholeness of
their life without denying the reality of any of its contents, no
matter how unpleasant or embarrassing. Secondly, it enables individuals
to get a feel for the consistency in the direction that their life is
taking as they discover potentials for the future hidden within their
personal past.
The goals of the program are attained by means of a variety
of written exercises which are done in a group setting under the
direction of an experienced leader who is committed to follow
authorized guidelines. Individuals in the group work in private with
the contents of their own life. The only prerequisites are an
atmosphere of quiet and mutual respect, and an attitude of openness and
acceptance on the part of each exercitant toward his or her own life.
The program is not only nonanalytic; it is also nonjudgmental
and is structured to help people exponentially discover answers to
questions such as the following:
Where am I in the course of my life right now? How did I get
to the place where I am in the course of life? Where is my life trying
to go from here? What is the next step?
The Intensive Journal method itself has no content. The
method is a dynamic structure to which each person supplies the content
from one's own life. The structure aims at enabling individuals to
establish deeper contact with the flow of creative energy in their own
life. It is especially useful for people engaged in decision-making,
for people who feel confused about the next step in life, for those who
have lost contact with the direction their life wants to take, for
those who feel alienated, isolated, or meaningless, and for those who
simply want to expand their personal horizons of creativity.
In creating the Intensive Journal program, Progoff had in
mind people in a secular culture who are unfamiliar with or alienated
by traditional religious language. However, the awarenesses stimulated
by the exercises of his method serve to help Christians experience
meaning in traditional doctrines which might otherwise remain merely
propositional. In the case of people who approach it from the
perspective of faith, the Intensive Journal program is a form of
prayer.
The Intensive Journal Method as Prayer
In a chapter entitled “Prayer as Dialogue,” Karl Rahner
discusses prayer in terms apropos of the Intensive Journal method. He
is addressing a common problem of people who are earnest in their
efforts to enter into dialogue with God. They often state the problem
something like this: "When I pray, I cannot tell whether I am talking
to myself or to God."
Rahner challenges the presupposition that God says
"something" to us in prayer. He raises some “what-ifs”: What if we were
to say that in prayer we experience ourselves as the utterance of God,
ourselves as arising from and decreed by God's freedom in the
concreteness of our existence? What if what God primarily says to us is
ourselves in the facticity of our past and present and in
the freedom of our future?
Rahner concludes that when, by grace, we experience ourselves
as the utterance of God to himself and understand this as our true
essence, which includes the free grace of God's self-communication, and
when in prayer we freely accept our existence as the word of God in
which God promises himself to us with his word, then our prayer is
already dialogic, an exchange with God. Then we hear ourself as God's
address. We do not hear "something" in addition to ourself as the one
already presupposed in our dead facticity, but we hear ourself as the
self-promised word in which God sets up a listener and to which God
speaks himself as an answer.'
Rahner is suggesting that God's word to me in prayer is not
an idea; rather, God's word to me in prayer is myself, that is, my
personal, individual life story-past, present, and future. The
implication is that my life story is important in my relationship with
God because it is the way God speaks to me and I to God.
A further implication of Rahner's proposal is that I enter
into dialogue with God ipso facto under three conditions: 1) when I
experience my life story as God's word addressed to himself; 2) when at
the same time I understand that God is really present in my actual life
story-past, present, and future- as a free and undeserved gift of
himself to me; 3) and when I freely accept my life story as the word of
God in which God promises his Word to me.
The Intensive Journal program is an instrument which lends
itself to the discovery of the real presence of God in one's own
personal life story. The content of the program is the content of the
life of the Journal-writer; hence it is through the life of the
Journal-writer that Christian faith may enter into the individual's use
of the Intensive Journal exercises. Progoff has described the prayer
dimension of his method as follows:
The Intensive Journal work is indeed a species of prayer and
meditation, but not in isolation from life and not in contrast to
active life involvement. Rather, it is meditation in the midst of the
actuality of our life experiences. It draws upon the actualities of
life for new awarenesses, and it feeds these back into the movement of
each life as a whole.2
The Intensive Journal Method and Spirituality
In his “handbook of contemporary spirituality,” Rahner raises
the question whether the term “spirituality” is good, understandable,
useful, or even has any meaning. Then he makes the observation that the
crucial point for personal and pastoral life today is not so much a
matter of getting the “spiritual” dimension of existence into our heads
or other people's by means of abstract and conceptual indoctrination
(which he says is ineffective anyway) as it is a matter of discovering
the Spirit as that which we really experience in ourselves.3
Perhaps Rahner slightly understates the case. It may be that the
crucial point for us personally and in our pastoral work today is
simply to discover "the Spirit" as a fact of our own personal
experience and to help others do the same.
Furthermore, in order to be able to use the word
“spirituality,” we might let it refer simply to the individual's
relationship with God or, in other words, to what goes on in the
creative process between God and each of us.
This article presents Ira Progoff s Intensive Journal program
as an aid to the process which is going on between an individual and
God. The program adds no content to the life of the individual; it
mirrors the movement which is already going on and stimulates that
movement by feeding new awarenesses back into the movement of life.
(“Journal feedback” is one of the main features which distinguish this
method from an ordinary diary.) This program, then, is a dynamic
structure for evoking self-transcendence from the factual contents of a
life story. For a person of faith it is a way of discovering the Spirit
“as what we really experience in ourselves.”
Genesis of the Intensive Journal Method
Following Progoff s discharge from the U.S. Army, he earned a
doctorate in the area of the history of ideas from the New School of
Social Research in New York City. On the basis of his dissertation,
Jung 's Psychology and Its Social Meaning, published in 1953 and still
in print, Progoff was awarded grants for postdoctoral studies with Carl
Jung for two years. By virtue of those studies Progoff was licensed as
a therapist by the state of New York, where he went into private
practice after returning from Switzerland.
In 1959 Progoff founded the Institute for Research in Depth
Psychology at Drew University in New Jersey and served as its director
until 1971. During those twelve years he and his graduate students
searched out the dynamics of creativity in published biographies of
creative people whose life stories had ended. From his research Progoff
concluded that creativity occurs through the interplay among various
dimensions of life which may at first seem disparate. On the surface it
may appear that the process in one dimension is unrelated to the
process in another dimension, whereas in fact something new comes into
being when the individual makes correlations among the dimensions of
life. It is as though the individual is a complexus of certain
processes which occur throughout life on different planes.
Progoff has developed the Intensive Journal method over more
than a quarter-century of helping his clients apply the fruits of his
research by discovering hidden sources of creativity within their own
lives. He began teaching his method to groups in the late 1950s. In
1975 he published At a Journal Workshop, a thorough description of his
method up to that time. In 1980 he published a companion volume, The
Practice of Process Meditation, which added another dimension to the
program.
Dimensions of Human Existence
In Progoff s view, the artist is paradigmatic. Each individual
is both the artist and the ultimate artwork of life, and yet
individuals execute the artwork which, is themselves by engaging in
outer activity which has inner meaning for the one doing it and
beneficial consequences for society. In other words, in order for each
of us to be fulfilled as an individual, we must do some work (opus as
distinguished from labor) which is both personally and socially
meaningful. At the same time as we are creating our lifework, the doing
of the work is creative of us. The basic dialogue of life is the
dynamic actual (as distinguished from logical) dialogue between human
creators and their works. In Progoff’s words, “Outward activity
propelled from within is the essence of creative existence.”4
From his research on the lives of creative people Progoff
learned to distinguish certain dimensions of life as loci of the
components of creativity. The Intensive Journal method recognizes those
dimensions as sources of the raw material of creativity in anybody's
life. They are the dimensions of time, of relationships, and of
personal symbols.
The Intensive Journal workbook uses color-coded dividers to
mark off various sections in each of which the Journal-writer deals
with the movement in one particular dimension of life. Within each of
the main sections are tabbed subdividers of the same color as the main
divider. Each tab bears the name of the specific exercise to be entered
there. For example, the “Life/Time Dimension” is indicated by a red
divider and contains four tabbed red subdividers; each of the four tabs
bears the title of the written exercise to be entered there by the
Journal writer. Similarly, the dimension of personal relationships in
life, called the “Dialogue Dimension,” is indicated by an orange
divider and comprises five tabbed subdividers for each of the five
“dialogue exercises.” The part of the Intensive Journal workbook for
making entries which deal with dreams and personal imagery is called
the “Depth Dimension.” It is indicated by a blue divider and five
tabbed blue subdividers.
In summary, the workbook comprises sections which reflect and
stimulate the movement of an individual life in each of its dimensions.
Each of the main sections of the workbook represents a dimension of
life and comprises several subsections for various written exercises
which deal with the contents of that life in styles appropriate to that
particular dimension.
The Dimension of Life/Time
We do not get the chance to start life over, but the Intensive
Journal program does offer us a tested means of restructuring our life
from the perspective of the present. At the same time it provides a
means of discovering unactualized potentials which we may have
overlooked the first time around, or which were not ripe then and may
at some point in time be able to take a form they
could not have taken originally.
In studying the biography of a deceased person generally
recognized as creative, the end or goal of that career may be clear and
unmistakable, even though the life story includes setbacks, stalls,
reversals, and obstacles. It may be easy to see how everything in that
life was leading up to some great scientific or philosophical work
because we are viewing it from the perspective of the end.
But what if I am the life story I am working with? In that
case the life process is still in progress. I am not looking at a still
photograph but a moving picture, and I am looking at it from the
inside. In that case I start with the present epoch of my personal life
and get a feel for this period of life from the inside. That is, I
allow myself to feel the quality or tone of my life during this present
period and record it objectively. The record I make of the present
period will be an objective statement of my subjective experience of
life at present. Then I am in a position to allow the course of my life
to present itself to me from the perspective of the present in the form
of about a dozen significant events. Each of those significant events
serves to characterize a whole period of life. Of course, many other
things also happened during that period. There are other exercises for
dealing with them. The idea in this exercise is to get a feel for the
wholeness and continuity of my life as I allow it to present itself to
me in an articulated form so that I can use other Journal exercises to
deal with it one period at a time.
All the Intensive Journal exercises presuppose the attitude of
openness and receptivity mentioned above, a nonjudgmental attitude
toward life. It is not so much the objective contents of a life that
affect its degree of creativity, as the subjective attitude toward that
life. In the creative restructuring of a life, a relaxed, friendly
approach which allows surprises is important.
Dimension of Relationships
In the life/time dimension treated above, there is a principle
of wholeness, continuity, and direction-toward-a-goal at work. In the
dimension of relationships, the dynamic is that of dialogue, that is,
the give-and-take of equals listening and responding to each other in a
spirit of mutual trust and acceptance.
The principle of “dialogue relationship” applies first of all
to significant people during various epochs of life. The same dynamic
applies analogously to meaningful work-projects (opera), which, like
persons, seem to have a life of their own.
In his research on creative lives, Progoff discovered that
creativity occurs when people approach several kinds of meaningful
contents of their life not as inert matter to be manipulated but as
personal entities. That is, he discovered that creativity occurs when
people acknowledge that each of several meaningful contents of their
life has a life story of its own analogous to that of a person. Each of
these contents of life has a life story with blockages to growth toward
a goal, with hopes, disappointments, successes, and so forth. He found
that for the sake of movement toward acceptance of life and all it
holds, it is of paramount importance to establish a “dialogue
relationship” not only with persons and works but with the physical and
societal dimensions of life, and with events, situations, and
circumstances of life which “just happen.”
Progoff’s research into de facto creative lives yielded two
important corollaries. First, the movement which the dialogue
relationship fosters is intrinsic to the creative spirit. Secondly, in
the dimension of relationships as well as in other dimensions of life,
the factual contents of life are less important in the creative process
than the way people relate to whatever the contents of their life are.
The “Dialogue Dimension” of the Intensive Journal workbook
offers a format for a variety of exercises which enable the Journal
writer to engage in written dialogue with people who have played
meaningful roles in their life, with work projects, their own body,
sources of values in their life (e.g., family, ethnicity, religious
commitment), and things over which they had no control. The purpose of
these dialogue scripts is to give a voice to the meaningful contents of
life, that is, to provide them a forum in which mutuality can flourish
in the form of a "dialogue relationship" rather than a merely
utilitarian relationship. This leaves the Journal writer open to the
possibility of something new emerging from an old relationship from the
past. That new something may contribute an insight or an awareness
which is of benefit to another relationship or which creatively affects
the movement in another dimension of life.
The Dimension of Inner Symbols
This dimension of life refers to dreams, “twilight imagery” and
personal wisdom-figures as the vehicles which come forward
spontaneously to carry the movement of life further. The aim of the
exercises in this part of the Journal, called the “Depth Dimension,” is
to facilitate spontaneous correlations between inner imagery and outer
life so that new insights, awarenesses, and possibilities for action
and decision-making might come to the surface of consciousness. Then,
by means of appropriate Journal exercises, they can be fed back into
the ongoing movement of life and thus stimulate growth by creating new
configurations in the way things fit together in life.
Progoff tends to shy away from the use of dreams in his method
because many people seem unable to deal with them except analytically.
The Intensive Journal method of working with dreams is basically to
allow the movement in a recurring dream or in a cluster of dreams to
suggest some correlation with movement in one of the other dimensions
of life. Then the exercitant may use appropriate Journal exercises to
work in that dimension of life.
The Fourth Dimension: The Spiritual
As mentioned above, Progoff sees the Intensive Journal work in
general as “a species of prayer and meditation... in the midst of the
actuality of our life experiences.” However, he came to appreciate the
role of the spiritual dimension in creativity only after he had
developed Journal exercises in the three dimensions of life treated
briefly above.
The specifically spiritual dimension is reflected in his
program as the dimension of meaning. The procedures for working in that
dimension are called “Process Meditation.” In the Intensive Journal
program, formal work in-this dimension is reserved for those who have
already taken part in the “Life Context Workshop,” which deals with the
three dimensions of life treated above. As Rahner has said, “A basic
and original transcendental experience is really rooted [in] a finite
spirit's subjective and free experience of itself.”5
The “process” of “Process Meditation” refers to “the principle
of continuity in the universe” which is found on three levels: the
cosmic, the societal, and the personally interior.6 The Intensive
Journal method helps the individual relate to “process” on the interior
level.
The movement of life in the three dimensions treated above is
characteristically movement toward personal wholeness and the
integration of the individual with oneself. Progoff calls that movement
“core creativity.” “In terms of individual lives,” he writes, “the
essence of process in human experience lies in the continuity of its
movement toward new integrations, the formation of new holistic units
[of life/time].”7
In the spiritual dimension of life the movement is
characterized by relationships which transcend the core creativity of
the individual. The roots of such relationships-even the personal
relationship of the individual to God-are to be found in the stuff of
everyday life, but at a deeper than ordinary level.
Rahner speaks of the knowledge of God as “concrete, original,
historically constituted, and transcendental.” He further says that
such knowledge of God “is inevitably present in the depths of existence
in the most ordinary human life.”8
Progoff interprets “meditation” broadly. In his usage it
refers to whatever methods or practices one uses in the effort to reach
out toward meaning. “The essence of meditation,” he says, "lies in its
intention, in its commitment to work inwardly to reach into the depths
beyond the doctrines of our beliefs."9 Hence, “Process Meditation”
refers to a set of exercises which draw on the individual exercitant's
intimations or experiences of connectedness to the principle of
continuity in the universe.
Progoff describes his method of Process Meditation as follows:
Our basic procedure is to reenter the process by which our
individual spiritual history has been moving toward meaning.... We
reenter that process so as to reconnect ourselves with the inner
principle of its movement, and especially so that we can take a further
step toward the artwork that is our personal sense of meaning.10
Conclusion
In a review of The Practice of Process Meditation, William V.
Dych, S.J., translator of Rahner into English, compares what Rahner
calls “the universal presence of grace and the Spirit” with Progoff s
thesis that “there is in every human being an inner source of new light
and life that expresses itself whenever the circumstances are right.”
Dych views Progoff’s thesis as so supportive of Rahner's position that
it would be hard to imagine a more positive affirmation of it.11
____________________________________________________________________________________________
NOTES
1 Karl Rahner, The Practice of Faith: A Handbook of
Contemporary Spirituality, ed. Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt (New
York: Crossroad, 1984), pp. 94-95.
2 Ira Progoff, The Practice of Process Meditation: The Intensive
Journal way to Spiritual Experience (New York: Dialogue House Library,
1980), p. 18.
3 Rahner, op cit, p. 186.
4 Ira Progoff, At a Journal Workshop: the Basic Text and Guide for
Using the Intensive Journal (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1975),
p. 35.
5 Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the
Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: The Seabury
Press, 1978), p. 75.
6 Progoff, The Practice of Process Meditation, p. 40.
7 Ibid. p. 58
8 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 57.
9 Progoff, The Practice of Process Meditation, p. 34.
10 Ibid. p. 82.
11 William V. Dych, "The Stream that Feeds the Well Within," Commonweal. 25 September, 1981.
Father John McMurry, S.S., is Director of St. Mary Spiritual Center
and a spiritual director at St. Mary's Seminary and University in
Baltimore, Maryland. He has taken part in 24 workshops led by Dr. Ira
Progoff since 1976, and he has led over 90 Intensive Journal workshops
since 1978. His address is St. Mary's Spiritual Center, 600 N. Paca
Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201-1995. Reprinted with permission by
Dialogue House Associates, 799 Broadway, Suite 410, New York, NY 10003.
"Intensive Journal" and "Journal Feedback" are trademarks of Ira Progoff and used under license by Dialogue House.
|
