Living in Process® is the work that was originally developed by Dr. Anne Wilson Schaef and continues to evolve and be facilitated by longtime members of her Living in Process training.
The Living in Process® work is about living—spiritual living and living spiritually. Dr. Anne Wilson Schaef originally named the healing work she was doing Living in Process (LIP) in the early 1980’s as she brought together her life experience as a Cherokee and the traditional ways she was raised with her vast education in clinical psychology and her life experiences living in Western Culture – which she has named “The Addictive System” and the “Technocratic, Materialistic, Mechanistic System.”
We all have the opportunity to live completely, fully, wholly, joyfully, and serenely with our spirituality expressed in every facet of our lives. Deep inside we resonate with that promise, yet may have lost our way back.
Living in Process is an invitation to journey into that deep movement of the all-encompassing spirituality that exists in each one of us, and feels in tune with the life force within and beyond us all—whatever we may choose to call it or however we may choose to approach it. Each of us has the possibility to move into our spiritual wisdom and link with the oneness of the all. We only have to remember and reconnect with what we have forgotten and moved away from.
Many cultures of the world have no word for spirituality. In these cultures spirituality is in the living. It is so integrated into life that it needs no separate designation. Yet, many of us have lost that integration as we try to cope with our lives. Living In Process is the reintegration of the spiritual into all that we do and all that we are. By segmenting ourselves and our lives we have reduced the spiritual to a very small corner of our lives.
Living In Process is about the relearning of living our wholeness.
After over four decades of working with people around the world, Dr. Schaef came to see that all human problems are ultimately spiritual. They result from our splitting off and compartmentalizing our spirituality and not recognizing it at all. Since we are spiritual beings, our solutions to our problems must come from our spiritual wholeness. All healing is based in our spiritual wholeness. The secret of living a whole life is accepting and being wholly who we are as full spiritual beings.
However, at the beginning of the 21st century, we find ourselves estranged from our oneness in God, and ourselves. We cannot embrace the fullness of spirituality without accepting the reality of life as a process and participating in the process of our lives. We cannot be observers in our own lives and expect to know and experience our full spiritual selves. We must first acknowledge our role in the process that has created our present reality, and accept our role as active participants in all of life’s process, in order to move in the direction of healing. We must see how our current worldview has contributed to where we are in our lives as a species, and in so doing be ready to move to new ways of being and living.
Valeria Teles interviews Pete Sidley.
Pete has been in the Living in Process training with Dr. Anne Wilson Schaef since 1987 and has worked with her as her righthand man and group co-facilitator since 1994. He helped Dr. Schaef in the process and production of all of her books since the early 90’s including Living in Process, Meditations for Living in Balance, Daily Reminders for Living a New Paradigm, Native Wisdom for White Minds and There Will be a Thousand Years of Peace and Prosperity and They Will Be Ushered in by the Women. Like everybody in the Living in Process work, Pete is doing his own personal recovery work and has been doing so for 35 years. He has traveled extensively throughout the world with Anne organizing and facilitating workshops and training sessions and also carried luggage, typed manuscripts, pushed wheelchairs, cooked, made travel arrangements and was the memory bank for Anne in the last years of her life.
