Find Your Bliss in Life
Through the Intensive Journal™ Program of Ira Progoff, PhD
A classic tool for gaining clarity and awareness for your ongoing development
A 50 year track record of helping thousands reach their unique potential!
Workshops taught internationally (mostly online) by certified leaders under the auspices of Dialogue House
What is the intensive journal method?
An Integrated Series of Writing Exercises
To access and connect with your emotions and experiences. Sample exercises cover personal relationships, career/special interests, life history, dreams and imagery, and spirituality.
Workshop Atmosphere:
Implementing Principles of Depth Psychology
- • Creates a progressively deepening environment working at a depth level away from your daily routine to become centered and access your inner process.
- • Work in total privacy in a non-judgmental and non-analytical frame of mind.
The Goals of the Program Include:
- • Get to know yourself better;
- • Develop the continuity and direction of your life;
- • Gain a foundation on your life as you work in its many areas;
- • Work through issues over time within the context of your life;
- • Become sensitive to using symbolic imagery as an integrated part of your life.
Practical Techniques for Working with the Deeper-Than-Conscious
- • Covers such areas as dreams, imagery, and spirituality;
- • Each area becomes an integrated part of an evolving life process;
- • Provide leads for creativity and insight about areas of life.
Workshop Details
- • Certified leaders guide you step-by-step through Intensive Journal exercises;
- • Offered under the auspices of Dialogue House, the administrative headquarters for the work of Dr. Progoff;
- • Conducted primarily online through Zoom;
- • Typically 12 hours in length, spread over 2 days with breaks to pace the work;
- • Scheduled on weekends and weekdays;
- • Typical costs are about $210-$225 per 2 day workshop.
Featured Article
Speaking & Listening: Entering Into Dialogue With Your Life
by Carolyn Kelley Williams
From Kelley Williams' Speaking and Listening: Download the whole article as PDF ↓
Kelley Williams has been a certified instructor of the Intensive Journal program for over 30 years. In her article, Kelley explains how Ira Progoff’s Intensive Journal method can help each person realize their potential in life and implement Joseph Campbell’s goal to “follow your bliss.”
Learn how to speak and listen to your life...
“ ...if you discover Progoff’s work, you will discover a simple but powerful journal-writing method that will indeed allow you to enter into dialogue with your life; you will have a means of speaking and listening as you evoke answers from your life about what it is seeking to become.”
Connect with your unique gifts and potentials...
“Campbell and Progoff both suggest that each of us comes into the world with a unique way inherent within us to express our gifts and potentials through our works and relationships. If we can bring this unique way of expression to awareness and live in harmony with it, we will experience the dynamic flow of life-energies, the integration of disparities, and the sense of inner direction and authenticity that Campbell would call our bliss.”
Enter into dialogue with your life to gain its wisdom...
“Ira Progoff created a practical elegant method to enter into dialogue with your life and gain access to its wisdom, to understand the meaning of its symbolic language, and to form an ongoing relationship with it in which you not only speak to it of your conscious plans and desires, but you listen to its goals and intentions for you; you invite it to speak to you of its inherent possibilities.”
Use the method over time to realize your bliss
“Coming back to these questions [“To what in my life is this drawing my attention?...What is my life asking of me?... What is it seeking to become?”] again and again as you work, over time you begin to see patterns in the cycles and seasons, the ebb and flow of energies, and to recognize a purposeful movement, a direction. Your life speaks to you from the pages. And, if you are faithful to the process, it will speak to you of your bliss.”
Use the Intensive Journal Program to Find Your Bliss
My goal in creating Dialogue House is to provide a place where people can go to work privately in their lives using the Intensive Journal method. Then, after the workshop, they can use the Journal on their own, returning as necessary to the workshops
Ira Progoff, PhD
Connect with your creative process to discover the real you
“The Intensive Journal process is our inner workshop, the place where we do the creative shaping of the artwork of our life.”
"Creative persons who reach out for the deeper mystery of reality... are also expressing their seed nature."
“The ultimate task of the new psychology is to reestablish man’s connection to life, to the sustaining forces beyond all intellectual doctrines."
"Events that seem to contradict one another all are part of the unity of process by which a life unfolds."
Learn a tool to use throughout your evolving life
"The Intensive Journal process is an open-ended means of gaining a perspective on where you are in the movement of your life."
"People become sensitive to the elusive threads of their inner lives when they have a definite way of working with them."
Work at a deeper-than-conscious level
"When our attention is focused inwardly at the depth of our being in the context of the wholeness of our life, resources for a profound knowledge of life become accessible to us."
"The method provides an indirect approach to solving our life problems ...we step back and move inward and meet them at a deeper level."
“Outward activity propelled from within is the essence of creative existence.”
Access symbolic imagery in its various forms
"The creative person is one who is able to draw upon the images within himself and then to embody them in outer works, moving inward again and again for the inspiration of new source material, and outward again and again to learn from his artwork what it wants to become while he is working on it."
Clarify and deepen the spiritual dimension of your life
"The meaning of life cannot be told; it has to happen to a person."
"Only an experience of a meaningful life can make a person whole."
"For many people the Intensive Journal process has evolved into a spiritual discipline that fulfills the creative role of awakening."
Highlights of Dr. Progoff’s Career
“The focus of my work has been to provide methods which will enable people to work continuously in their lives. it gives an inner perspective to guide them through transitions, evoking creative potentials and drawing forth new sparks of spirit as they move towards becoming whole persons.”
Creator of the Intensive Journal Program
01
First American to Complete His Doctoral Dissertation on the Work of Dr. Carl Jung
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Upon reading Dr. Progoff doctoral dissertation, Dr. Jung invited Dr. Progoff to study with him in Switzerland in the early-mid 1950s, with a focus on the latter works of Dr. Jung. Dr. Progoff’s dissertation was published as Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning. He later wrote a book on Dr. Jung’s concepts of synchronicity entitled Jung’s Synchronicity and Human Destiny.
Dr. Progoff presented at the annual Eranos conferences in Switzerland from 1963-1966 with his articles being published in Eranos Yearbooks. Dr. Jung was intimately ivoed in these conferences prior to his death in 1961. Dr. Progoff published these articles in his book, The Dynamics of Hope.
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02
Wrote a Trilogy of Books on Depth Psychology Describing His Theories of Human Development
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The titles are Death and Rebirth of Psychology, Depth Psychology and Modern Man, and The Symbolic and the Real. These works formed the basis for creating the Intensive Journal method.
03
Created the Intensive Journal Method in the Mid-1960s
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Provides a practical way for people of different backgrounds and interests to develop their lives;
Implemented his theories of human development that he termed holistic depth psychology;
Taught internationally under the auspices of Dialogue House through its certified leaders.
04
Refined the Intensive Journal method; professor, lecturer and author.
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Conducted hundreds of Intensive Journal workshops nationwide as he refined and developed the method further. Workshops also conducted for low income staff at a geriatric center and for offenders in the criminal justice system.
Graduate school research professor at Drew University in New Jersey studying the lives of creative persons and the processes that made them creative and dynamic.
Well-known lecturer on a broad range of topics related to psychology and spirituality.
Author of numerous published articles on his philosophy of human development and the Intensive Journal method.
05
Authored Fourteen Books on
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The Intensive Journal method;
Meditation (Entrance Meditation readings);
The work of Dr. Jung;
Depth psychology;
Mysticism.
Endorsements
The Intensive Journal Process is one of the great inventions of our time.
Joseph Campbell
I first learned of Ira Progoff, and the Intensive Journal process, in the graduate certificate program of Applied Mythology at The Retreat at Pacifica Graduate Institute. I am a long-time fan of Joseph Campbell and I told myself I had signed up for the certificate program on intellectual whim, but the truth is that I felt really lost, there had been many times over the last few years that I got knocked down and I was starting to struggle to get up.
Like Vasilisa the Wise I’d left home some time ago, looking for that elusive fire, but I’d never found my way to the dreaded Baba Yaga’s hut. I’d gotten lost in the woods and convinced myself I felt at home there – that I belonged in those dark and frightening places. But I could not stay lost and wandering forever, and I hoped that the myth program might help me find my way as the writing of Campbell had done in the past.
Instead, it led me to something I didn't even know I needed. Through the Intensive Journal process, I was able to write my own story, to follow my own footsteps back to where I needed to go. In my first workshop, I surprised myself when I wrote the words, “the threads of my life have formed a Gordian knot in my chest; I’m scared of the world because I think I can’t possibly handle it.” It was that day that I admitted how far off the path I had strayed, how helpless I had come to feel. At the end of my most recent workshop, I wrote, “gone are the days of believing I am small.”
I was drawn to myth because it gave me a sense of belonging and purpose, I saw myself in these stories of old, but I forgot that as often as I look at them, they also look back. Myth isn’t just something “out there,” it’s inside of us as well, and when I was able to look back on my tracks through the woods, when I was able to see my own Hero's Journey, as the Intensive Journal process helped me to do, I realized that they told the story of where I have been and who I am, if only I remember to look.
There are still things that don’t make sense to me, and the world is a scary place at times, but I feel more okay with that, I can make space for it, because whether it’s conscious or not, the story of me is running through me all the time, and I can return to that inner source of deep knowing and life-energy to which the journal work give us access again and again whenever I need to find my way.
Kayley Saunders
Simple Ways to Learn More
We have many ways for you to learn about Dr. Progoff’s pioneering work in depth psychology and the Intensive Journal method. If you find our program of interest, we invite you to join our mailing list and consider attending an Intensive Journal workshop.
1
Read our two most popular articles
The Way of the Journal, by Robert Blair Kaiser Download PDF ↓
This article originally published in Psychology Today provides an excellent introduction to the program, describing the workshop experience and Dr. Progoff ‘s unique background and philosophy.
Dr. Progoff explains his philosophy of human development and key principles and aspects of how he implemented it in creating the Intensive Journal method. Dr. Progoff discusses the importance of each person connecting with their inner nature to realize their potential. He explains how the Intensive Journal method can help us achieve this goal.
“One of the goals of psychology is to help individuals to live and unfold the potentials of their being in terms of the wholeness of their inner nature rather than a partial or fragmented aspect of their outer lives.”
“The creative process in people’s lives takes time to unfold before they can truly realize their potential and know what their lives are are trying to become. Before that occurs, people experience cycles of hope and anxiety, success and failure, confidence and uneasiness...
“The Journal provides an instrument that helps people to maintain perspective as they wmove from the valley of anxiety until they reach the upward phase of the cycle. They learn from these cycles of experience so their awarenesses are enlarged and new capacities are realized. They work through their cycles of experience to realize their potential.”
2
Listen to a portion of Dr. Progoff’s lecture entitled Creativity & Spirit in History & Today - Realize the Uniqueness of Your Life
Dr. Progoff examines the search for individual meaning and direction in life against the backdrop of a fast-paced society where traditions have broken down. He discusses each person’s task of developing his or her unique life as an ultimate artwork. This lecture was conducted at a symposium in which Joseph Campbell participated.
3
Purchase Dr. Progoff’s award-winning book At a Journal Workshop (Rev. Ed. 1992)
Describes each Intensive Journal exercise with background information. An excellent resource to use after attending an Intensive Journal workshop.
"One of the most significant psychospiritual books of the twentieth century."
Common Boundary Magazine Award
Common Boundary’s distinguished committee selected 65 books of the twentieth century which transformed individuals or impacted the fields of psychology and the nature of spirituality, or both. This list included leading figures from the fields of psychology, philosophy and theology such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Martin Buber, Norman Vincent Peale, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May.
Dr. Ira Progoff was selected for his pioneering book on the Intensive Journal method - At a Journal Workshop (original edition 1975).