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Category Archives: Journaling & Healing
Method for Creative Development
Created by Dr. Ira Progoff, a depth psychologist, the Intensive Journal® program is an integrated system using writing exercises to help you develop your life.
Learn how to work with your experiences and emotions, resolve issues and gain a whole-life perspective. Give your work greater direction, clarity, and purpose by tapping into your creativity and by overcoming writer’s block.
Intensive Journal® exercises help you avoid preconceived ways of thinking to achieve breakthroughs that were previously not possible.
At our workshops, certified leaders guide you stepby-step through the exercises with the protections of total privacy. Our program has a 40-year history of helping over 175,000 people.
Implementing the Progoff™ Methodology Through the Intensive Journal® Method
The Intensive Journal® method, based upon Dr. Progoff’s unqiue approaches for self-development, has a solid foundation in theory and approach. Here are some of the method’s major features.
Intensive Journal® Workbook: Mirroring the Growth Process
The structure of sections and corresponding writing exercises in the Intensive Journal® workbook mirror the subjective process of perceptions and thoughts taking place inside yourself. Designed with minimal terminology, these procedures provide the means for moving directly into your inner process and drawing forth emotions and experiences to make them accessible and tangible for further development.
Inner Development: Evoking Your Potential
Focusing on inner development, where the most penetrating insights are generated, the Intensive Journal® method provides you with an integrated system for dealing with issues through a direct experience in your life. Certified leaders guide you step-by-step through the method in a contemplative atmosphere. Non-judgmental and non-analytical approaches further the psyche-evoking process. You become immersed in your own growth, drawing forth your unique potential and unfolding life process.
A Framework for Stimulating Your Creativity
The Intensive Journal® method provides you with a safe and effective framework from which to explore and develop your life.
Overcome Writer’s Block
The Intensive Journal® Process helps you access a stream of material generated from your life experiences. This flow brings certain symbols and images into consciousness, as well as life experiences and ideas that may have been forgotten or repressed. Because there is an inherent movement in the Process, fresh material and ideas are revealed.
Spur Your Creativity
If you feel stuck or unsure of what to do next in your writing, the Intensive Journal® Program allows you to enter the steady stream of repressed personal material. Discover ideas you never knew you had. Gain insights about the direction you would like your writing to take.
Develop Meaningful Personal Imagery
The Intensive Journal® Process provides a unique way of working with dreams and imagery to uncover meaningful personal symbols. This personal imagery can be transformed into powerful metaphors in your writing, bringing depth and intimacy to your work. By accessing your personal images, you can open up new doors in your personal life and professional life. Images can evolve and grow over time, to become sources for larger, more integrative works.
I have understood later…that all my pictures are dreams. Not in the meaning that I have dreamt them now, but in a way I have– I have written them, and I have seen them before I have written them. Everything I have seen or heard inside…or felt…And I have combined reality so exactly as the dreams combine. And every picture– every one of my pictures are dreams. And when– and if the audience secretly perhaps have seen inside, suddenly meet in their minds, meet my dreams. And feel that they are close to their dreams. I think that is the best communication.
Ingmar Bergman, in an interview with WNDT-TV New York
as quoted in The Dynamics of Hope by Dr. Ira Progoff.
Connect with Your Life Experiences
Draw on your life experiences to bring a sense of closeness and understanding to your work. The Intensive Journal® method is an invaluable tool for those who write memoirs or life stories. Our process puts you in direct contact with your unfolding life process. Gaining greater understanding of life experiences can enhance both your writing and self-understanding.
Journal Feedback™ Technique: An Active Dynamic Process
Through the Journal Feedback™ process, you avoid self-conscious analysis and preconceived ways of thinking to overcome blockages and foster breakthroughs. Issues are viewed from different angles to realize connections and to create integrations of awareness. Structured as an active and evocative instrument, the Intensive Journal® workbook helps you generate energy and momentum to move forward through cumulative ongoing entries.
Whole-Life Process: Greater Perspective and Safety
Progoff’s “whole-life” approach provides important benefits of perspective and safety. Greater awareness about a wide range of life experiences creates a foundation for making decisions. Issues can be viewed in a larger context and become more manageable. Using Progoff™ techniques allows for issues to develop, protecting you from premature judgments.
Dr. Ira Progoff – founder Intensive Journal® Workshop
Since the 1950’s, Dr. Progoff has devoted his life to the exploration of new ways to encourage creativity and to enhance individual growth. He is a leading authority on C.G. Jung, depth psychology and transpersonal psychology as well as journal writing.
Dr. Progoff completed his doctoral dissertation on the psychology of C.G. Jung from the New School for Social Research in New York City. His thesis was published in 1953 as Jung’s Psychology and Its Social Meaning. After reading Dr. Progoff’s dissertation, Dr. Jung invited him to study with him in Switzerland as a Bollingen fellow. He studied with Dr. Jung in 1952, 1953 and 1955. In addition, Dr. Progoff gave several Eranos lectures in Switzerland during the 1960s, where he presented his theories of holistic depth psychology.
As a practicing depth psychologist and Director of the Institute for Research in Depth Psychology at Drew University from 1959 to 1971, Dr. Progoff conducted research on the dynamic process by which individuals develop more fulfilling lives. As a psychotherapist, he found that the clients who wrote in some form of a journal were able to work through issues more rapidly. Through this research, he then developed and refined the Intensive Journal Method in the mid-1960’s and 1970’s to provide a way to mirror the processes by which people become dynamic and develop themselves…continue reading
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Method of Self-Development
Created by Dr. Ira Progoff, a depth psychologist, the Intensive Journal® program is an integrated system using writing exercises to help you develop your life.
Learn how to work with your experiences and emotions to awareness and insights to give your life greater direction, clarity and purpose.
Intensive Journal® exercises help you overcome preconceived ways of thinking to achieve breakthroughs that were previously not possible.
At our workshops, certified leaders guide you step-by-step through the exercises with the protections of otal privacy. Our program has a 45 year history of helping over 175,000 people.
A Framework for Your Evolving Life
The Intensive Journal® method provides you with a safe and effective framework from which to explore and develop your life.
Practical Ways to Develop Your Life
- Explore and connect with your unique life experiences to gain a greater sense of the continuity and direction of your life.
- Work through transitions more effectively. Placing issues within the context of your total life experiences helps you to realize your capacities for moving through to the next phase of your life.
- Deepen your awareness about personal relationships, health, career, and major events using Progoff’s unique dialogue process.
- Learn how to revisit prior experiences in a non-threatening way. Your life history becomes a rich avenue from which new perspectives and choices can reveal themselves.
- Connect with your inner process to help you access and listen to hunches, intuitions and imagery that are important sources of wisdom.
- Utilize Progoff’s unique non-analytical methods for working with dreams and imagery.
Utilize the Writing Process to Connect to Your Life
- The process of writing helps you access feelings and experiences to make them tangible for further development. You are not writing your life story. You do not have to like to write or write well; only you will read what you have written.
The Workshop Setting: A Profound Experience
- The Progoff™ methodogy works best in a workshop setting where you are away from your daily routines over an extended period of time. You can relax and focus inwardly as our leader guides you step-by-step through the exercises.
- The built-in protections of privacy in the workshop help you feel safe to be honest with yourself, building trust in your own inner wisdom and capacities. No one comments on your life.
1 At a Journal Workshop (rev. ed. 1992), by Ira Progoff, Penguin Putnam, p.8 (affiliate link)
2 Depth Psychology and Modern Man, by Ira Progoff, McGraw-Hill Paperback
3 At a Journal Workshop (rev. ed. 1992), by Ira Progoff, Penguin Putnam.
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Try a Sample Intensive Journal® Exercise
Now you can begin to experience how the Intensive Journal® method works through a sampleexercise. It is important to do the exercise in a setting of complete silence, with a pen and paper (not a computer), when you can relax and take your mind off your daily life. Record what comes to you; do not edit or censor. Write the date at the top of the page and the name of the exercise, “Period Log.” You should allow about 45 minutes to complete the exercise.
- Describe the “Now” period of your life; an open ended period that has a beginning but no ending. Examples include: three years since you moved to a new city or started a new job.
- Record your thoughts, feelings, memories – whatever presents itself to you. Complete the phrase: “It is a time when….”; record images that describe the period.
- Describe more details about this period: people, projects or activities; your health; attitudes about society; important events; dreams or imagery; people who inspired you; and choices or decisions you made.
- Read back what you have written and record any thoughts and feelings that you have during this process of writing and reading back.
Through the Period Log exercise, you are beginning the process of reconnecting with the many different aspects of your life from which new perspectives and opportunities can reveal
themselves.
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