The Healing Arts
Process-Relational Therapies
Process philosophy is not only a set of abstract ideas concerning what the universe is like, but also a disposition—an attitude, a habit of the heart—that influences how we live in the world, understanding ourselves as co-participants in a larger web of life and inwardly animated by a call to care for life.
It includes a desire to help heal the world from suffering and promote flourishing. This disposition, for many process philosophers, also involves a sense that there is a spiritual presence throughout the universe—a Tao, if we wish—that is a spirit of creative transformation with its own orientation toward love, cooperation, and growth. For those shaped by this disposition, there is a natural interest in healing and wholeness, and in therapies than can help people in need.
In contemporary healthcare, several forms of therapy are well established as traditional or conventional practices. These include physical therapy, which restores movement and bodily strength; occupational therapy, which helps people regain skills for daily living and meaningful activity; speech and language therapy, which supports communication and swallowing; and counseling or psychotherapy, which fosters emotional insight and behavioral change through conversation and reflection. Other recognized forms include recreational therapy, respiratory therapy, massage therapy, and nutritional therapy, all of which address important aspects of human well-being. Each of these disciplines plays a vital role in promoting health and recovery.
Yet the scope of healing is even broader than the clinical model suggests. Alongside these established therapies, there are many complementary and emerging approaches that engage creativity, community, and the more-than-human world. There is no expectation that individual therapists or even therapeutic agencies can be versed in all of these forms. Many are practiced informally, some are unpaid or community-based, and certification is available for certain modalities but not for others. The basic point is that the therapeutic art itself is in process—evolving and expanding in response to new insights, needs, and possibilities. Individual and group therapists can recognize the richness of these many approaches, learning from them and, when appropriate, incorporating their wisdom into their own practice. The ten therapies that follow—rooted in art, nature, relationship, movement, and service—illustrate how a process-relational outlook can deepen our understanding of healing as participation in the Tao of love, cooperation, and growth.
It includes a desire to help heal the world from suffering and promote flourishing. This disposition, for many process philosophers, also involves a sense that there is a spiritual presence throughout the universe—a Tao, if we wish—that is a spirit of creative transformation with its own orientation toward love, cooperation, and growth. For those shaped by this disposition, there is a natural interest in healing and wholeness, and in therapies than can help people in need.
In contemporary healthcare, several forms of therapy are well established as traditional or conventional practices. These include physical therapy, which restores movement and bodily strength; occupational therapy, which helps people regain skills for daily living and meaningful activity; speech and language therapy, which supports communication and swallowing; and counseling or psychotherapy, which fosters emotional insight and behavioral change through conversation and reflection. Other recognized forms include recreational therapy, respiratory therapy, massage therapy, and nutritional therapy, all of which address important aspects of human well-being. Each of these disciplines plays a vital role in promoting health and recovery.
Yet the scope of healing is even broader than the clinical model suggests. Alongside these established therapies, there are many complementary and emerging approaches that engage creativity, community, and the more-than-human world. There is no expectation that individual therapists or even therapeutic agencies can be versed in all of these forms. Many are practiced informally, some are unpaid or community-based, and certification is available for certain modalities but not for others. The basic point is that the therapeutic art itself is in process—evolving and expanding in response to new insights, needs, and possibilities. Individual and group therapists can recognize the richness of these many approaches, learning from them and, when appropriate, incorporating their wisdom into their own practice. The ten therapies that follow—rooted in art, nature, relationship, movement, and service—illustrate how a process-relational outlook can deepen our understanding of healing as participation in the Tao of love, cooperation, and growth.
1. Horticultural Therapy
- Focus: Uses gardening, plant care, and interaction with nature to promote physical, emotional, and spiritual healing.
- How it works: Participants engage in activities such as planting, watering, pruning, composting, and garden design. These tasks cultivate patience, sensory awareness, and connection with the cycles of life and growth.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Gardening embodies creative becoming. Each seed planted represents a moment of relational creation—an act of cooperation with nature’s unfolding. The garden becomes a living process of co-creativity between human and more-than-human life. In this view, we are kin to other creatures—plants, soil organisms, insects, and animals—all participants in a shared web of becoming.
2. Art Therapy
- Focus: Uses creative art-making—painting, sculpting, drawing, or collage—as a way to express feelings and promote psychological healing.
- How it works: Guided by a trained art therapist, individuals create visual representations of inner experiences. The process allows for emotional release, self-understanding, and transformation of pain into meaning.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Art is a moment of concrescence, a unification of feeling and form. It mirrors Whitehead’s view that creativity is the ultimate reality and that beauty emerges from the harmonizing of contrasts. In this process, the artist’s inwardly felt desire for satisfaction seeks aesthetic achievement—the fulfillment that comes from realizing beauty, harmony, or intensity within experience.
3. Music Therapy
- Focus: Uses sound, rhythm, melody, and improvisation to enhance emotional, cognitive, and social well-being.
- How it works: Through singing, instrument playing, movement, or listening, participants engage with music to express emotions, evoke memories, and build connection.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Music reflects the rhythmic nature of existence and has a special capacity to embody and evoke feelings and emotions—indeed, music is what feelings sound like. Each tone arises from and contributes to the flow of becoming, embodying the relational harmony and tension that characterize life itself.
4. Play Therapy
- Focus: Uses play, imagination, and creative performance as therapeutic tools to foster emotional expression, social growth, and self-understanding.
- How it works: In play therapy, especially with children but also with adults, participants engage in storytelling, role-playing, improvisation, or expressive movement to explore feelings and relationships in a safe, imaginative space.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Play therapy can be understood as a form of art therapy, albeit one that draws upon the creative and performing arts—such as improvisational theatre and music—to awaken spontaneity and relational awareness. From a process perspective, play embodies the creative advance into novelty in its purest form: open-ended, relational, and transformative. It invites participants to rehearse new ways of being in the world, joining with others in a shared process of becoming.
5. Animal-Assisted Therapy
- Focus: Uses relationships with animals—such as dogs, horses, cats, or other companion species—to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical well-being.
- How it works: Participants engage with animals through companionship, grooming, walking, riding, or simply being present with them. The nonjudgmental responsiveness of animals helps foster trust, reduce anxiety, and encourage empathy and connection. Such encounters can awaken a sense of calm and mutual care that supports healing.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Animal-assisted therapy reflects the process view that we live in a community of subjects, not a collection of objects. Animals are fellow participants in the creative advance of the world, each with their own feelings, aims, and capacities for relationship. Healing emerges through the mutual prehension of one another’s presence—moments of co-feeling that transcend species boundaries. In such encounters, we experience what Whitehead might call the withness of the body extended into the more-than-human world, reminding us that all life is interconnected and capable of shared transformation.
6. Mindulness Therapy
- Focus: Draws upon meditative, mindfulness-based, or prayerful practices to cultivate awareness, presence, and compassion. This may include mindfulness-based stress reduction, centering prayer, breathwork, yoga, or silent reflection.
- How it works: Participants learn to slow down, attend to their bodily and emotional experience, and become more aware of the flow of thoughts and feelings without judgment. Through sustained practice, contemplative awareness opens space for calm, insight, and renewed connection to self, others, and the wider world.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Contemplative therapies embody the process insight that each moment of experience is a fresh act of becoming—an opportunity to feel the world anew and respond creatively. In silence and awareness, we attune to the divine or sacred lure toward harmony and peace that pervades existence. Contemplative practice helps participants sense themselves as participants in a living universe that is always in process, always inviting deeper communion.
7. Storytelling Therapy
- Focus: Uses the creation and sharing of stories to promote healing, self-understanding, and transformation.
- How it works: Individuals or groups are invited to tell, retell, or reimagine their personal or communal stories. Through dialogue, reflection, and creative narration, participants gain new perspectives on their experiences and uncover fresh possibilities for meaning.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Storytelling therapy reflects the process view that reality itself unfolds as a living story, shaped moment by moment through relationships. Our personal narratives are not fixed but evolving—open to reinterpretation and renewal. By re-authoring our stories, we join the divine lure toward creative transformation, finding coherence and beauty amid change.
8. Poetry Therapy
- Focus: Engages reading, writing, and sharing poetry as a path toward emotional expression, self-discovery, and healing.
- How it works: Participants compose or reflect on poems that articulate their inner lives, using rhythm, imagery, and metaphor to give voice to what may otherwise remain unspoken. Poetry groups often foster empathy and connection through shared reflection and performance.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Poetry therapy embodies Whitehead’s idea that language is a lure for feeling. Each word, like each event in the universe, gathers emotion and possibility into form. The crafting of a poem becomes a moment of concrescence—a unification of emotion, memory, and imagination that transforms experience into beauty and insight.
9. Movement and Dance Therapy
- Focus: Uses bodily movement and dance as a medium for self-expression, emotional release, and integration of body, mind, and spirit.
- How it works: Participants engage in guided or improvised movement, exploring rhythm, gesture, posture, and flow. Sessions may include group movement, individual improvisation, or dance rituals that invite awareness of the body as a living field of feeling and communication. Movement becomes a language through which emotion, memory, and imagination are expressed and transformed.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Movement and dance therapy exemplify the withness of the body that Whitehead describes—the intimate sense of bodily participation in each moment of experience. Every gesture is a microcosm of the universe’s ongoing dance of becoming. In moving with others and with the earth, participants feel the rhythms of interdependence, discovering healing in motion, fluidity, and relational grace. Dance thus becomes a celebration of the creative advance into novelty, where the body itself is both artist and artwork in the unfolding of life.
10. Volunteer Therapy
- Focus: Emphasizes volunteering and acts of service in the local community as pathways toward both personal and social healing.
- How it works: Participants engage in meaningful acts of care—helping at food banks, mentoring youth, planting community gardens, visiting the sick or elderly, or supporting local ecological projects. Through these activities, individuals experience belonging, purpose, and interconnection. Healing emerges not through introspection alone but through participation in the well-being of others.
- Connection to Process Philosophy: Volunteer therapies express the process conviction that we find ourselves in relation to others and that the self is enriched through acts of compassion and contribution. Each act of service becomes a moment of concrescence in which one’s energy, empathy, and creativity are integrated into the larger flow of community life. In serving others, we align ourselves with the divine lure toward beauty and harmony, discovering that personal renewal and social transformation are two sides of the same process.