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Writing Our Truth: The Intensive Journal™ Process Explored

by Kate Scholl

“As the oak tree lies hidden in the depths of the acorn, so the wholeness of the human personality with its fullness of spiritual and creative capacities lies hidden in the depths of the human being silently waiting for its opportunity to emerge.” -- Ira Progoff, Depth Psychology and Modern Man

Her body shuddered as she read what she had written on Saturday afternoon of the Depth Contact Intensive Journal workshop. Her writing proclaimed her “fundamental essence of being”, there was no need to disassociate, wholeness was within her grasp; wholeness was within her. She and her body were one and she did not need to be ashamed, fearful or trapped in her memories any longer.

It was a moment of intense connection. All of us in the workshop greeted Mary’s reading with profound silence, receiving her experience as gift to us all. At that time, we shared with Mary her intense encounter of connection with her body that she had lost 40 years earlier. I did not need to know the details of her childhood experience to share that with her. I was a witness to a new beginning.

Personally, as the workshop facilitator, I experience times such as these as moments of deep and profound grace. To me, they speak to me of God’s presence within each life story, reminding me of Meister Eckhart’s image of God waiting at the door of our heart and, the moment we open it, God floods us with loving presence.

My role is one of witness, not therapist or guide. I am to guide in the way of the method only, not people in their lives. Their own work and inner stirrings guide them; I simply explain the process and make the space for people to experience that.

The Intensive Journal method uses “psyche evoking” exercises, rather than analysis or diagnosis. This means that the exercises evoke the energy within the person, by working deeply and in a manner that is connected with the person’s experience.

In over 70 Intensive Journal workshops I have led over the past 20 years I have witnessed the transformation of many lives. People find peace or reconciliation after separation, job loss, relationship breakdown, illness or other trauma.

Not that everyone who comes brings a particular pain or wound. Many people come out of an intuitive knowing that they need to be there or a feeling that they are lost and need guidance. Their motivation may be a feeling of restlessness or dissatisfaction with their life or an awareness of being at a crossroads in their life. People sometimes come with a major decision that they face. However, there have been a few people over the years who have not found the workshop satisfying. It is not a process for everyone but I think it can offer something to most people at certain times in their lives. I am convinced that timing is so important — to come when there is inner sense that this is something for me.

Exploration and integration

The time I came to learn about Progoff and attend my first Intensive Journal workshop was during a year of full-time study at Loyola University of Chicago and a liminal phase in my life. I was ready and open to explore and I was in a graduate program that encouraged personal exploration and integration. Conscious of feelings of disappointment and rejection from the job I had left, I thought the four years in that work had been a waste.

What the Journal enabled for me in the next few years was to go back to that work and see it in its fullness. Yes, there had been disappointment and dissatisfaction. But there had also been tremendous success. I had made a difference and I had learned much and grown personally and professionally. In my pain I could not see that, but the processes in the Journal brought this realisation home to me. It was an integrating and healing experience.

The Intensive Journal method is a radical process; radical in the sense of taking us back to our roots, to the ground of our being, the truth of who we are. The workshops make the space to go there, to be there and write about what happens in that place.

Sharing in the workshop (always optional) is to read from what you have written. Progoff emphasises this strongly: only read what you have written, no need to explain or analyse it, just let it be and notice what is happening to you as you read — the truth of our experience there without comment or judgment. The writing is painful, joyful, cathartic, funny, disturbing, affirming and sometimes just ordinary.

It is our life which holds all those emotions and experiences.

This emphasis on experience and staying with our experience reminds me of Don Meadows’ comments at Eremos’ 20th Anniversary conference day in 2002. He said when Eremos began it invited people to share from their experience, what it was like for them, what had happened or was happening for them. Not what I think about it or how I am right or someone else is wrong, but what my story is.

As a facilitator of many courses and workshops over the years, I know this to be difficult. People want to move away from what happened or, perhaps, don’t want to spend time there in the first place. It is easier to share ideas and concepts than it is to share my deep experience.

What the Intensive Journal method invites us to do is to stay with the experience and from there to follow the leads we receive from our writing, imagery and meditations; it evokes in us the skill of deep listening and attending to what is happening. This is one of the many reasons why Eremos is an ideal sponsor for the Intensive Journal program.

'Unfolding process'

Ira Progoff, who died in 1998 at the age of 76, created the Intensive Journal process in the early 1960s and founded Dialogue House in New York City, which administers the workshops and enable this exquisite process to be available to thousands across the world. He had written the first doctoral dissertation in the USA on Carl Jung at the New School for Social Research and then received a fellowship to study in Zurich with Jung. By this point Progoff was already beginning to form some of his Journal processes.

Progoff’s other passion was to study the lives of creative people. He wanted to know what made them creative and studied poets, writers, painters, philosophers and artists. What he found was an “unfolding process” in these lives, a sense of encounter with their work, whatever it was, that almost recognised the work as having a life of its own. What was also obvious about creative people was their passion for a project and how it gave them so much energy and drive to proceed with their work even when others did not support their work or ideas.

Progoff sought to embody this in the methods he created. He began with his own life and invited his psychotherapy clients to try various methods of writing as well. He would also sometimes invite a client to sit quietly during their session and allow images to arise. He found that these images provided information about what was going on at a deeper level. This he developed into “twilight imagery”, which is simply entering a place within ourselves where unconscious images may come and we receive them and record them.

What Progoff created in the Intensive Journal method is a process of writing that enables a person’s deep inner wisdom to become conscious and a source of guidance in their journal writing and in the conduct of their lives. He wanted to give people a tool that was practical and of use in whatever setting a person might be.

He tells the story of Brother Lawrence, a 17th century monk who came to a point in his life where everything he touched seemed to end in failure. “He felt that he was clumsy and a clod and that nothing worked in his life at all. One day, feeling the emptiness and futility of his life, he was sitting on a bench in winter looking at the trees. Suddenly he became aware of the fact that the trees had no leaves. They were bare. The thought came to him then that that was exactly how his life was at the moment, empty and bare. Then the realisation came to him that the trees would not be forever without their leaves but that in due time their greenery would be restored. And what is it, or who is it, that will restore the leaves to the trees in due time?

“Persons in the 20th century might not begin by giving the answer that spontaneously came to Brother Lawrence, but he gave the answer of the 17th century person. He said, ‘It is God.’ And with that he had the further realisation that the same universal process by which God will restore the leaves to the trees would eventually restore energy and a capacity for living to him.

“In that moment the outer world became a meaningful sign to Brother Lawrence and an active evoker of an inner process that had become dormant within him. The experience of perceiving the correlation between outer and inner realities is one of the important ways that profound symbolism is brought to active life in the depth of human beings ... It was thus that Brother Lawrence was given his experience of the ‘Presence of God’ which not only enabled him to move through the immediate problems of his life but gave him access to a source of strength and guidance that carried him through a series of achievements over many years.” (From “Notes on the Intensive Journal Method and the Transitions of Life: A Program for Pastoral Use" by Ira Progoff, Keynote address at the International Convention on Religious Education 1977.) Progoff was a student of many religious traditions. He was a child of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He was influenced by Jewish mysticism, Hasidic teaching, Buddhism (DH Suzuki), Christianity (particularly Paul Tillich) and Taoism (Lao Tse) and French philosophers (Buber and Bergson). These names are some of the people he speaks of in his writing, but by no means is this list comprehensive. The influences on Progoff are numerous and extend into every discipline.

For Progoff, the way to work on problems is to connect to our depths and the problems will be worked out from there; to allow the outer life and inner reality become one. The method is indirect, the means are sometimes elusive. In his workshops he always stressed the wholeness of the process: “Yes there is pain, but that is not the totality of your experience ... Stay with it and see where it takes you.”

When we analyse, we cut it open and cut ourselves off from our experience. Progoff would encourage people to “trust the process”, follow the leads their writing generated and stay with their experience.

In April of 2002 I had the privilege and great joy to attend the first ever gathering of Intensive Journal workshop leaders in the USA. We began with a Journal workshop and, before beginning our seminar, we told stories of how we came to this work.

I met a Methodist minister from Texas who has been meditating for 30 years, a 70-year-old woman from California who led workshops with maximum security inmates in Folsom Prison. I met a university lecturers, counsellors, social workers, business people, musicians, priests, educators and retreat leaders. These leaders came from a variety of religious traditions and no religious tradition.

Dorothy Dawes, our host in New Orleans, told the story of the first workshop she attended. “There were people there who had done it before, some of them many times. I thought there must be something wrong with these people or something wrong with the workshop if they have to keep coming back!” Dorothy knew Sr Helen Prejan (author of Dead Man Walking) and she had given an Intensive Journal workshop for families of victims. We shared in common a deep love of the process and profound respect for Ira Progoff and the legacy he left to us. It was as if he was there. I came home to Australia inspired and energised to help the Intensive Journal workshops flourish in Australia.

An atmosphere of depth

The Intensive Journal method offers a means of making our inner life real and actualised in our outer life. We do this by exploring our life, in its many aspects, our life history, our relationships, our work, the groups and organisations and hobbies that we give our energy to or have given energy to in the past. It is by exploring these in an “atmosphere of depth”, where each person does their own writing and includes in that time “twilight imagery” and meditations which access the depth, which keep us from staying on the surface. In that community that is formed in each workshop, we find our inner resources, actualise and express them and carry them with us into our everyday life when the workshop ends. We are artists creating our lives while listening to the deep stirrings which will guide us to paint on the canvas of our lives, an artwork which is integrated and a true image of our essence and beauty. We take away this valuable tool: our journals that we have begun in the workshop and the methods that we have learned.

What people report at the end of the workshops is the experience of deep connection. An intimacy with one’s life that is profound. Not a “shout it from the rooftops” sort of reaction, but a deep knowing and confidence in who I am and who I am becoming.

I discovered the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke the same year I discovered Progoff. He writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the depths in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.... And after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”

All the decisions that I have made since that time have followed Rilke’s guidance, which is actualised in the process of the Intensive Journal method.

For information on workshops in Australia see https://www.eremos.org.au/events

Written and published in EREMOS Magazine in 2003 www.eremos.org.au

Kate Scholl has led Intensive Journal workshops for 35 years in Australia. She is an experienced workshop and retreat facilitator, recently retired from work in Mission and Spirituality for the St Vincent de Paul Society in New South Wales (NSW).