How can she hope that her client will become free if she herself is not?

This book explores the ways that therapists express, through their feeling attitudes, their fundamental beliefs about life. These attitudes permeate and shape all of the therapist’s apparent techniques. Conceptually, I raise these essential, underlying feelings of the therapist to “skills” that must and can be studied and cultivated. I call these

By metaskills, I do not mean that we should focus on the ideal feeling attitudes of the therapist but instead concentrate and study the actual feelings that a therapist has from moment to moment. The task is to make these attitudes conscious and useful in the therapeutic situation.

wanted to focus precisely on the way we practice therapy and what living practice reveals about our deepest beliefs.

Esalen Institute

feeling attitudes such as fluidity, compassion, humor, playfulness, and shamanism allowed these basic beliefs to come to life in practice. I elevate these feeling attitudes to the level of a skill appreciating and cultivating them with as much love and depth as ordinary techniques. The concept of metaskills implies a new art form or discipline that

“What kind of world do we want?” and “How do we manifest this world view in practice?”

I was excited by process work’s determination to embrace the disavowed aspects of our experiences, and its efforts to go beyond solutions to our problems towards more sustainable approaches to body symptoms, near-death experiences, relationship issues, extreme states, and large group conflict situations.

Her deepest beliefs and feelings are the earth from which all techniques spring.