Process Work Institute

PWI Diplomate Spotlight: Cathy Bernatt, Making Meaning from Mess

August 9, 2015. Cathy Bernatt is leaving Portland at 6:00 p.m.

A three-week wilderness solo ahead. Divorce just finalized. Third master's degree in Process Work complete. She's ready to go deep into discovering what she and the world wanted from her next.

At 7:39 p.m. an 18-wheel drunk commercial truck driver swerved into her lane. She hit the median. Spun. Hit the trailer. Spun again. Now she was hurtling back toward the concrete median at 60 miles an hour. She saw death. She knew exactly how it would happen. She closed her eyes and waited for her body to shatter.

It didn’t. But almost everything else did.

Traumatic brain injury. Emergency surgery. Ninety minutes of physical therapy every morning just to get out of bed. Eight months of headaches that built through the day until they became almost unbearable. She couldn't read. She wasn't allowed to work for two and a half years.

Her identity as a doer disappeared almost overnight.

A year later, on the way to her first dinner party since the accident, the Uber she was riding in was T-boned. Second brain injury. Four tendons snapped. Everything she had painstakingly rebuilt spun backwards.

"Process Work didn't save me," she says. "It went into the wreckage with me."

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Before Process Work found her, Cathy Bernatt had already spent three decades as an experiential educator, facilitator, executive coach, and organizational consultant.

Outward Bound, her first great teacher, had taken her from snorkeling into early scuba mastery. She learned to go beneath the surface of human dynamics, sensing the undercurrents, the unnamed tensions, the thing beneath the thing.

Yet something deeper kept pulling.

Process Work found her on the way to facilitating a corporate drum circle. A book on a co-facilitator's dashboard. Sitting in the Fire.

"It didn't feel like discovering something new," she says. "It felt like finding language for something I had sensed for years."

Working with Arny Mindell in the middle of that very first seminar, she found herself shapeshifting into a blue heron.

"It was wild, profound, and completely outside anything I could explain. I walked away knowing that Process Work wasn't simply another way of thinking. It was another way of being."

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After the accident, Process Work became an indispensable companion as she navigated a very different wilderness journey than the one she had planned.

Through the Dream Body Medicine Forums she worked with Dr. Pierre Morin. Going into the mystery, coming out with only the next step. That became enough.

Then came what she calls Cathy's Not Art Art. Twice a day, her hands moved through watercolor, acrylics, and pastels, making knotted, tangled images she could never have planned. Her hands could make visible what her brain could not.

A friend, Ivan Verny, a Swiss psychiatrist and Process Worker, suggested attaching a haiku to each piece. A way back through the side door. Syllable by syllable. Over five years she created hundreds of them.

"I learned, really learned for the first time, how to BE and feel the wisdom, intelligence, and mystery alive in that BEING, in all its nuanced forms.

Until then, much of my life had been organized around doing.

Five years of recovery. Those years put me in contact with my body in a way nothing else could have. Process Work helped me access that somatic wisdom, go scuba diving within, and grow entirely new pathways from the inside out.

I've spent decades helping executives and leaders navigate conflict, power, and purpose.

All of it runs deeper now because of what those years taught me from the inside.”

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"The mess out there and the mess in here have often never met."
Ask Cathy to describe her particular flavor of Process Work and she doesn't hesitate.

"I am a hunter.

An insatiably curious hunter.

A hunter of messes. A hunter of disturbance. A hunter of harmony. A hunter of power dynamics and Power Intelligence.

I hunt the finger pointing out there, and what it is avoiding or blind to, in here.

I go inside. Because whatever is being blamed out there is almost always happening in here too. The mess belongs to the room and to the people in it. The mess is just covered up with platitudes and defenses and denials.

And I teach others to become hunters in their own spaces. To study themselves from the inside out. To find where, what they are talking about happening out there, is happening right here. In the room they are sitting in, in the body they are sitting in.

The mess out there and the mess in here have often never met. Most of us are in deep relationship with the one out there. Finding where one lives inside the other—that's the hunt. That's where transformation comes alive.”

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This is the raw material of the Making Meaning from Mess Series

July 2026:
Befriending the Inner Critic: From Self-Attack to Fierce Inner Leadership

August 2026:
Staying Human When Things Escalate: How to Regulate and Find Choice When the Heat Takes Over

September 2026:
Tracing Our Triggers: Finding the Wisdom Inside What Activates Us

October 2026:
Cultivating the Inner Witness: Authentic Movement and the Body's Hidden Wisdom

November 2026:
When Helping Has a Shadow: How to Stop Rescuing and Start Listening for What Matters

December 2026:
Feedback Without the Fog: How to Say What Happened, What Mattered, and What's Possible Next

MMM July:
Befriending The Inner Critic

This Workshop is For You if You've Ever…

- Been harder on yourself than you would ever be on someone else.
- Replayed mistakes long after everyone else had forgotten them.
- Felt driven by a fear of getting it wrong.
- Struggled with perfectionism.
- Questioned your abilities despite evidence of your competence.
- Felt trapped between pushing yourself and exhausting yourself.

What You'll Leave With

- Greater awareness of your inner critic and how it operates.
- A deeper understanding of the roles and voices within your inner world.
- Practical ways to engage self-criticism without collapsing into it.
- Increased capacity for self-leadership under pressure.
- Greater freedom from automatic patterns of self-attack.
- New ways to access the intelligence hidden beneath criticism.

3 Meeting Options!

Online Options (Replay Available):
July 22, 8am-10am Pacific
July 22, 4pm-6pm Pacific

In Person Option at PWI:
July 25, 5:30pm-7:30pm Pacific

Price: Sliding Scale
Pay it Forward: $120
Standard: $80
Equity: $60

Level: All Levels Welcome. No previous Processwork experience required.
Details and Register: https://community.processwork.org/spaces/23913883/about

In Processwork, we look to spontaneous and unintended movement to gather information about energies or qualities a person may be less aware of.

Jung saw the unconscious as a living intelligence, always moving toward wholeness. The indicators of what that wholeness are right there in your body's spontaneous movements! A person talks about feeling disempowered, but they make. a strong fist.

Quantum physics suggests we are not solid or separate, but field, wave and probability. The movements that arise in your field are part of your hologram. Showing you meaningful and often marginalized aspects of who you are.