Encounters with the Spirit

Isit down to write this article, full of enthusiasm. I turn on my computer, and as I wait for it to boot, my mind races ahead and the article is finished before the file finally appears on the screen. I feel depressed by the thought of starting from the beginning when I've already seen the end. I stare at the blank screen and feel defeated by the effort. Where to begin? My excitement has plummeted into hopelessness in the time it took for my computer to boot. I look out the window, and as soon as I turn my gaze away from the computer, my thoughts start up again. Once again, ideas tumble forth, lively and exciting. But when I glance back at the empty screen, I sink. Before I know it, I have clicked into my solitaire program and am running through my fifth game of solitaire in two minutes. My mind whirls with ideas as I mindlessly click and drag the icons across the screen. Click, drag, double click. I am writing the article in my mind while the repetitive, lulling movements of the mouse distract another part of me.

I feel like an addict. It is not necessarily the solitaire, nor is it alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, sex, shopping, or any other substance or behavior. I feel like an addict because I am caught in a web of compelling, unconscious, and repetitive behavior. Writing brings me to an edge; it challenges me to believe in my ideas and battle self-doubt and insecurity. Writing means getting by the guard dogs at the gate, past a whole range of self-defeating emotions that prevent me from doing something new, difficult, and outside the boundaries of my known identity. And it is here, at the edge, that I tunnel¹ away from the difficulty. The solitaire, or the looking out the window, allows me to "sort of satisfy my goal of writing, but only in my thoughts, not on paper. Calling my edge behavior an addiction highlights certain dynamics of chronic, long-term edges. This article explores how edges, particularly long-term edges associated with a life myth, are like addictions.² Conversely, we may assume that addictions are linked to long-term edges. While process theory has emphasized addiction as a signpost to an altered state, I would like to add that addictions also point to chronic, long-term edges related to our life myths. Confronted with the challenge of incorporating a new aspect into our identity, or living a lifelong dream or ambition, we come to an edge, the limits of our known, comfortable identity. At this edge we develop certain ritualistic behaviors or patterns, whether or not substances are present.

A chronic edge revolves around a life myth. The life myth represents our self beyond our social role. It is an archetypal identity, a force, creativity, or energy represented in our dreams, body experiences, and transpersonal experiences. This archetypal nature is difficult to identify with for many reasons, primarily because our identities are often conditioned and enforced by social norms and consensus reality. Also, our resistance, or edges, against these mythic processes, or against any disavowed process, are organized around difficult experiences, events and traumas. In a way, it is simply easier to avoid living our true natures. In this sense, our normal identity, or what we call a primary process, can actually be thought of as long-term edge behavior, behavior that avoids another part of ourselves. Thus we are who we are in our primary process because it is the less difficult option.

Primary process as edge behavior

Judy, a woman in her late 30s, came to me with the following dream:

A jumbo jet was having trouble taking off. It was flying dangerously close to the ground, to houses and power lines. I was afraid its wings would hit a house or get tangled in the power lines and crash. But I knew that as soon as the Labor Prime Minister, who was flying the plane, was replaced by the conservative Prime Minister of the opposing party, everything would be all right.

Judy's presenting difficulties were with her partner and children. They accused her of being overbearing and controlling. She thought it was true and was trying to change. Judy used to be an artist but gave it up when she adopted her two children. She was an immensely creative and powerful woman, and was struggling to find an outlet for her creativity and power. Her associations to the Labor Prime Minister were that he was a gregarious, outgoing politician. He had funded many social programs but was accused by his enemies of cronyism, overspending taxpayer's money and of being an alcoholic. The other Prime Minister was fiscally as well as personally conservative, less willing to fund social programs, and generally less fraternizing.

The dream seemed to recommend: put the conservative into the cockpit, and the jumbo jet will lift off. The plane, Judy's force and creative power, could not get off the ground with the labor Prime Minister in the cockpit—he was too "social." The part of her that was social and outgoing could not fly the plane; she needed a more tight and conservative nature to channel her creativity. Judy identified with being very related and found it hard to be alone with her own work. She was full of ideas, plans and dreams, but she tended to socialize or get involved in her kids' projects rather than to focus on her dreams. She was overbearing because her creativity and force were channeled into too small a vessel. The plane was flying too close to the neighboring houses—her relationships. Her creativity was simply too large to be poured into friendships or parenting. She needed a larger vessel to set her aloft.

In a sense, we could say that Judy's primary process, her relating, was an addiction. It was not just a primary process, that is, something she identified with, but a chronic form of behavior created in part by her inability to focus on herself. It was easier to relate to others than to focus on her own projects. She used relationships to avoid a huge task, her life myth. For Judy, relationship is like an addiction, a chronic edge behavior that protects her from something she finds difficult or traumatic. This type of addictive edge behavior is a common pattern; many of us use our more primary aspects to avoid other parts of ourselves.

This process gets highlighted when we take on new challenges through work, relationship, or school. In another example, Dan and a fellow participant worked as therapist and client in a training seminar. Dan was the therapist. In the midst of the work he became confused. He asked the supervisor to come in and help, and as the three of them discussed the work, it became apparent that Dan was unsure of the structure of his client's process. He said that his method of working had been to follow his heart and to maintain a loving connection. He acknowledged that he wasn't sure of the edges, channels, and process structure. Dan admitted that he should know the basic structure at this point in his training but had avoided studying signals because he found it so difficult. He said he repeatedly tried to study videotapes but always got depressed and hopeless. Studying reminded him of his cold, analytical teachers and of feeling stupid at school. He had been an emotional child and suffered because he was forced to leave that part of him behind in order to succeed. Even though he was now a successful educator, he still felt stupid and afraid of being uncovered as a fraud.

After an emotional discussion about his early education and childhood, the supervisor asked him what he wanted to do about this lack in his training. There was an awkward silence. Dan looked down, shifted uncomfortably, and said he would try to work on it. Everyone in the room, including Dan, looked unconvinced. His answer felt perfunctory, like an expected but not heartfelt confession. The supervisor turned to him and said in a compassionate tone, "Dan, clearly you have suffered, and being able to follow your heart with people in your work has been a healing for a wound. Yet we are at a critical point upon which your studies hang." The supervisor paused. She looked at him and said, "I think you have to make a decision to face that pain and include the analytical part in your work. I don't think you'll get further with your studies without making that decision."

Dan's loving and open nature was one of his talents, yet he had been using it as a fence to protect against trauma. In a sense it was a "defense mechanism," a way to avoid abuse, but it also kept aspects of himself locked up within the core of his abuse. He used warmth and compassion in his work, not only because those qualities were strengths or his true nature, but also because he did not have access to other parts of himself. Hence his warmth became an addictive form of behavior; he didn't have another choice without hitting an edge. His loving nature and the cold analytic teacher were elements of his long-term process, his life myth. Dan is now an educator himself by profession, and attempting a new course of studies in midlife. Clearly, the drama around school, educational abuse, emotionality and analytical thinking is central to his life myth.

Both examples highlight the addiction-like structure of edge behaviors. In Judy's case, relating was an addictive tendency which helped her avoid focusing on herself. Similarly, Dan used love because his analytical part was locked up in a traumatic event. In both cases, what looked primary, that is, part of their sense of identity, was in part constructed by edges. Perhaps for both of them, at one time, developing their relatedness or love had been healing, helping them recover from abuse. But now these behaviors were no longer helpful; in fact, they were addictive. In this sense, what becomes addictive is not the behavior, but avoiding an edge. We become addicted to avoiding a sore spot; we cling to other behaviors and identities rather than face a painful fact. For Dan, at one time avoiding and getting away from the cold, analytical educational system and supporting his loving and emotional nature was essential to his growth. Now, however, the very thing that had healed him had become a means of avoiding another part of himself. He needs a new relationship to his edge, a way to negotiate that edge and pick up the parts of himself locked up in the abuse.

Second attention and developing a metacommunicator

Process work understands addiction in part as a tendency towards an altered state. The altered state that a substance or behavior produces catapults us over an edge into a new state of consciousness. While some theories see addiction as a struggle between user and substance, the process paradigm sees addiction as a struggle between states of consciousness. Process theory's teleological view sees addiction as a "cure" for our normal state of consciousness. For instance, a business person, one-sidedly focused on achieving and working, consistently represses fatigue, emotions or anything that threatens her intent. Thus she may have an addiction to wine or something else that compensates her one-sided drive. Wine creates a feeling of relaxation without too strongly jeopardizing her identity. The altered state offers something valuable to the user.

Altered states theory gives a psychological explanation for why we become addicted: the altered state that the substance or behavior produces is only a whiff, a replica or imitation of what we yearn for. Max Schupbach gives the analogy of being on the road. You're yearning for your own bed at home, so you go to a hotel instead. It's a bit like home, but not quite. The altered state produced by the substance is the hotel, not the home. For instance, when I smoke, I access an altered state: my eyes close, my breathing slows and deepens, my muscles loosen. But smoking only promises this state; it does not fully deliver it. Many substance users say that nothing is as good as the first drag, hit, snort, or experience of the substance. The first drag is closest to the pure state and everything afterwards falls short. This "almost but not quite there" experience addicts us. We keep using to achieve the promise, but since the desired state never really arrives, we pursue the addictive experience over and over again.

Another reason we become addicted to the substance is that by using a substance to catapult us over the edge, we never develop the ability to negotiate the edge to the experience ourselves. We gain access to an altered state at the cost of our second attention.³ Bypassing the edge is like being carried over a threshold; we have not done it ourselves, and do not know the procedures involved. We avoid an encounter and forsake the learning that transpires there. A simple reading of process work may see its goal as helping people cross their edges, moving from a primary or known identity to a lesser known, disavowed identity. Yet the edge, while originally seeming to be a hindrance along the route to a secondary process, is taking a more central place in process work. The negotiation at the edge to the secondary process results in an increase in learning and awareness. Working on edges develops second attention, the disciplined awareness necessary to perceive minute, unintended, irrational experiences that fall outside normal, everyday reality. While the first attention is the normal awareness we develop to deal with everyday reality, or awareness of what Mindell calls the "victim body," second attention is the awareness necessary to focus on the dreambody. Mindell calls second attention the ability to:

focus upon things you normally neglect, upon external and internal, subjective, irrational experiences. The second attention is the key to the world of dreaming, the unconscious and dreamlike movements, the accidents, synchronicities and slips of the tongue that happen all day long. (1993, 24-25)The development of second attention is an ancient technique found in many forms of Tantric, Hindu and Buddhist meditation practices. For instance, Tantric meditation techniques encourage the practitioner to hold her attention on a sacred object, sound or vision, without the mind wandering. This is also true of some forms of Vipassana meditation. The idea is to catch the moment when our mind wanders and bring it back to the meditation focus. While in process work we may find the wandering mind an important process, we would agree that the moment of catching the wandering mind, regardless of how we use it or evaluate it, is a component of developing the skill of second attention.

Second attention is instrumental in process work. One of the basic ideas of the process paradigm is to differentiate the flow of events into those experiences which are related to our identity (primary process), those which are further from our identity (secondary process), and signals of discomfort and excitement accompanying a secondary process (edge phenomena). This differentiated perception depends entirely on second attention, for our ordinary awareness is trained to perceive only those experiences close to our identity. Without second attention we simply get swamped by experiences, sensations and emotions, not knowing whether the experience is primary, secondary, or edge phenomena.

Second attention also builds and develops a neutral metacommunicator, an inner therapist who can attend to our experiences without judgment, and an openness to experiences that may threaten or provoke us. Practicing inner work requires a detached, disciplined awareness to detect moods, inner judgments, prejudices, biases, and figures that torment us. Without a neutral metacommunicator, inner work can be sheer hell; we are at the mercy of demons, monsters and critics of all shapes and kinds! The minute we focus internally, we get depressed, hopeless, fearful, and moody.

Second attention is the concentration we need to hold and fix signals in our awareness. It enables us to notice and negotiate edges, to stay alert in altered states, to interact with edge figures, and to follow subtle signals in unoccupied channels. Without second attention we are dreamt up by the dreaming process. Instead of following and unfolding the dreaming process, we become identical with roles and figure without awareness of what role we are in and how to make it useful. Getting pulled into the dreaming process without our awareness is dreamwalking,⁴ or passive participation in a dreamed-up experience. This type of being dreamt up is less useful in therapy, for we have unwittingly become a figure in the dreaming process and are working without a neutral metacommunicator. When we are dreamt up without awareness, we promote the thoughts, opinions, and affects of the dreaming figure. Believing we are neutral, we are actually attached to a particular outcome. Working with the unknown without second attention means we have merged with the experience.

In Carlos Castaneda's Tales of Power, Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman, teaches Carlos second attention through the art of gazing at distant objects. He shows Carlos the danger of merging with the experience. According to Don Juan, the trick is to not let the object use its intent to pull in the gazer. Carlos recalls Don Juan's warning: "I should not let the blotch pull me, but gradually go into it. The thing to avoid was letting the hole grow and suddenly engulf me" (1977: 265).

The development of second attention and edge work as negotiation

How exactly does working at the edge develop second attention? Typically we describe an edge spatially—as a place, a boundary between identities. But in practice an edge is a dynamic, a conflict between aspects of ourselves. The mechanism of the edge is the repression or disavowal of parts of ourselves with which we or others are in conflict. Thus, connecting with a disavowed aspect of ourselves means incurring the displeasure of the repressor and redressing the wound that established its disavowal. Living a disavowed aspect of ourselves may threaten inner or outer figures, and in some cases means revisiting the original trauma or abuse that set up the edge in the first place. Thus an edge can be a negotiation with pain, personal history, ghosts and abuse. Working on the edge may mean deciding to deal with pain, difficulty or conflict.

We are in a terrible double bind: we crave our secondary processes, but getting to them is painful. It is human nature to try to avoid the edge, to get through the border without getting caught in the pain. Immigration is an apt analogy, for states of consciousness are not dissimilar from states and nations. Let's say, for instance, that we come from a small town in midwestern America—conservative, parochial, traditional. Our whole lives we have dreamt of living in Paris—a Mecca for our disavowed sensuality, spontaneity, freedom, and artistic expression. We know that going to Paris will be the ultimate healing for having grown up in Centerville, Iowa. But getting to Paris means going through customs and immigration. Our personal history, our luggage, will be examined and opened. We will be questioned and treated with suspicion. It brings up our shortcomings, our weak spots, our past. We have to tolerate this cross-examination and fight for our desire to be in Paris! If only we could just go direcdy from Iowa to Paris without this damned immigration! Yet in fact, the immigration process is Paris. If we get through immigration and its humiliating, challenging, abusive moments, if we stand for our reasons for wanting Paris, we reveal our own Parisian nature. We have embodied those aspects of Paris we crave.

Bypassing the negotiation means we never fully identify with the new state. In the case of immigration, when we sneak over the border of a country, we become illegal aliens. We have no passport, no identity card, no formal identification with the territory. Our new identity results from the negotiation with the officials at the border, not simply from being in the place itself. This means that our identity changes through working on our edges, not only through having the experience of our secondary processes. This may explain why it often seems that our process changes course just at the moment we aire getting comfortable with the new secondary process. It is not the point to hang out in the new country; rather, the point is the negotiation.

Sneaking over boundaries is like tunneling under an edge, using an altered state to get over an edge. There are times, however, when we use altered states deliberately to get over the edge. We change channels, take substances in a fantasy, use movement work or body work to do things and experience aspects of ourselves with which we do not normally identify. Experiencing a disavowed part in an unoccupied channel may temporarily bypass the edge. For instance, if John's normal identity is to be a hardworking, intelligent student, he may dream of a disavowed aspect of himself, i.e., the clown, fool or village idiot. If we ask him to imagine being silly or foolish, he cannot do it. But if we begin to move around, we may find this dream image in movements and nonverbal signals. By amplifying the movements, we access the experience and find ourselves staggering like drunks, stumbling and clowning around. John has bypassed the edge temporarily, picking up a secondary process, but in a channel he does not identify with. Thus it is a lesser threat to his identity— it is not "him" yet. This type of edge work deliberately bypasses the big edge and builds patterns of the experience over the edge. At some point, later on, the edge may have to be addressed. Working in a lesser-known channel is similar to Don Juan's use of psychotropic plants to loosen Castaneda's fixation on the tonal,⁵ the world of consensus reality. Altered states help expand the mind, develop patterns and increase familiarity with another state of consciousness.

How do we differentiate in practice between tunneling and a deliberate, temporary avoidance of the negotiation? In the example with John, above, if the therapist spent what seemed like an eternity pushing him to move around the room like a drunken fool, only to have him sit right back down, and in his normal self, ask, "What was that all about?" we might assume that avoiding the edge negotiation was a loss of awareness, not a gain in experience. If, on the other hand, John stumbled drunkenly around the room, laughing, obviously enjoying himself, and afterwards sat down, looking disheveled, altered and asking, with a big grin, "What was that all about!?" then we may imagine that the experience, whether or not accompanied by identification, was a gain. John bypassed the negotiation at the edge and went into an altered state. His consciousness was expanded; he experienced something new about himself with the help of a "psychotropic" channel change.

There is no general rule for when to bypass the negotiation at the edge. It seems, however, that where the development of second attention is a goal, as in certain long-term processes, and in training contexts, bypassing the edge negotiation may result in a loss of second attention and happens at a cost to the individual. An example of bypassing the negotiation and losing second attention comes from Castaneda's experiences with Don Juan. In his 15 years of training, Carlos was led through amazing altered states of reality and accomplished marvelous feats of power. But on his own, without Don Juan's second attention or psychotropic plants, he could neither remember those experiences nor repeat them. Carlos' second attention had been developed through the use of power, plants. One of Carlos' fellow apprentices, La Gorda, explained:

[Don Juan] said that his power plants had made you lopsided; they had made you cut through your attention of the tonal [everyday world] and had put you direcdy in the realm of your second attention, but without any mastery over that attention. (1977: 250)

In our earlier example with Dan and the supervisor, the supervisor challenged Dan to negotiate the edge to his analytic abilities. Dan's recurrent use of love with clients was diminishing his second attention. He had developed a talent at working with a related style, but could not use his mind in his work. The supervisor's challenge not only pushed Dan to develop his analytic abilities, but pushed him to become aware of his addictive avoidance. With chronic edges, being helped over the edge is less useful than waking up to our relationship to the edge. At some level we choose to avoid certain processes, and hence, we need to choose to go over the edge, address the difficulty and make a change.

Implications for edge work: facilitating our relationship to nature

Process work has changed and developed over time. One of the biggest sources of new knowledge comes from teaching. As we struggle to teach process work, we discover aspects of the theory that had been implicit and intuitive. In addition to the skills of identifying double signals, edges and amplification, there are metaskills⁶, the feeling attitudes and beliefs about people, nature, and life that shape our use of skills. Another change over the years is that it has become less focused on what the person does and more focused on awareness. Finally, working with people in altered states, extreme states, and in stages of dying has led to a more sophisticated understanding of the metacommu-nicator, the part of us that communicates about our experiences.

Insights gained from working with chronic edges lead to another distinction in practicing process work: instead of focusing on getting over the edge, edge work means facilitating the individual's relationship to the edge. What is the person's relationship to her edge? How is her own nature going to deal with the conflict, the point of choice? Is she interested in her edge? Does she have a metacommunicator or a part interested in tracking these experiences? There is a complex interplay of factors that determine an individual's relationship to his or her experience.

An occupational hazard among therapists is that at times we are more interested in helping our clients change than they are. When we enthusiastically urge our clients to change, we may miss the fact that our enthusiasm, rather than our clients' interest, keeps the ship afloat. The danger is not only that our goals run counter to our clients', nor the fact that we may burn out, but that our efforts overshadow the client's own relationship to her process. How people negotiate the edge shows their spiritual nature. What happens to people at huge intersections in life? How do their natures deal with conflict? Edges may reveal a background depression and hopelessness. They may reveal a warrior who bursts through at the last minute, or may bring the person to admit a need for help and relationship. When someone comes in for help with an acute crisis, helping with an edge may be all that is needed. However, with long-term therapy and with therapy oriented towards training therapists, seeing the person's relationship to her own process is critical.

In addition, if the therapist sees her job as helping people over their edges, she may be going against nature. The spirit has its own timing; processes ripen in their own rhythm, and sometimes change is completely out of the client's or therapist's hands, and up to God, nature, or the Tao. Being at the edge, being allowed to interact with it, not only to get a push over it, reveals important aspects of the person that may have been obscured by the therapist's own engagement in change. Thus, following a person's process means not only following signals, but following—or sometimes challenging—the person's relationship to their signals. The secondary process is no longer the central goal; facilitating the person's relationship to her edge becomes increasingly important.

Additional factors influence how people negotiate an edge. Does the person have the second attention necessary to focus on the process? Does he or she have a metacommunicator neutral enough to help the person work on the edge, or is awareness used against the person? Sometimes secondary processes or edges are used as cannon fodder against the client. Working on anything secondary is resisted because the metacommunicator, the inner therapist, uses the information to put the client down. For some people, getting over the edge is simply a behavioral change created out of the therapist's intent; it is unsustainable because the client has not had the opportunity to develop second attention and an inner metacommunicator who can take the process the next step.

Being at the edge also reveals the individual's momentary therapeutic goal and method. Some clients may need an outer push or an ally who shows keen interest in their process. Others may need to avoid the negotiation altogether, to get away from the pain and challenge and take a time-out. Others may be interested in experiencing the challenge and tension of the edge. Some people have a preference for out-of-body experiences. At the edge, they may lie down, dissociate, space out, or go into a trance. These people will give negative feedback to any intervention requiring curiosity, excitement, awareness, or intention at the edge.

For example, a person who is pushed over the edge and then sits down and says, "What was that all about?" may need help, not to go over edges, but perhaps to not go over edges. They may be more interested in ignoring their secondary process, disagreeing with it, resisting it, and having it out with the spirit. Related to this are the client's larger therapeutic goals. Is she looking for help with a problem? Does she want support in relationship or with a challenge in the world? Is she interested in developing second attention and her own inner therapist? These deeper needs determine an individual's relationship to her edges.

Thus we as therapists should be considering not just how to get our clients over their edges, but how to help them relate to their edges. We should be working with people with an eye towards their curiosity about themselves; the state of their metacommunicator, noticing who is there to work with the process; the client's own interest in and development of second attention; and finally, their deeper goals for therapy. This is the distinction between awareness facilitation⁷ and therapy.

The larger goal of process work may be less in helping people access secondary material than in facilitating people's relationship to their process. Facilitation means noticing people's way of being at, interacting with, and processing edges. Holding the attention on the negotiation at the edge develops second attention. In situations where the person is working on a long-term process or life myth, or in training contexts, helping someone over the edge is temporarily helpful, but not sustainable. If the therapist begins straining—changing channels, role playing, cajoling, using skills galore to get the person to pick up the secondary process, the person may have an incredible experience, which he will not be able to make sense of, use, or reproduce in ordinary reality.

Facilitating, rather than therapizing, may look less helpful, more challenging and detached, than how we imagine therapy should appear. While it may seem that helping someone over long-term edges is useful, in the long run it may be disempowering and even patronizing. The therapist's engagement in getting the client over her edge may obscure the relationship between the client and her process; it is at the edge, in our encounter with the spirit, that our true natures emerge. One of the central points in training ourselves and others to be therapists and facilitators is putting the therapeutic focus on the development of second attention, on the individual's relationship to nature and her relationship to her edges, on her ability to stay alert in the midst of the most challenging altered states and complexes.

Conclusion

The ideas developed here revolve around understanding chronic edges as addictions that cost us the development of second attention. Edge behavior is similar to an addiction, a pattern of unconscious behavior that tunnels around a difficult spot. If we skip the negotiation at the edge, we never fully develop the skills needed to negotiate edges. This is one of the great sufferings associated with an addiction. The sense of self-hatred that can accompany long-term addiction is sometimes related to an inner sense of failing, or of avoiding challenge and difficulty. When we use a substance to enter an altered state, our full consciousness was not used to get there. No one witnessed the experience; no one took notes. Thus we actually set up an addiction because we do not have the tools to negotiate that edge again by ourselves. We lost the steps and will have to use the substance again in place of second attention.

Our methodology of working at edges needs to be expanded by understanding edges as addiction-like processes that help people avoid pain. In this sense, aspects of our primary process become elements of edge behavior, the means to avoid addressing a more difficult and disavowed experience. As process workers, we may lose sight of long-term development if we see our task only as helping people over their edges. In addition to being fluid shamans who can jump into the dreaming process, we also need to develop our sober, detached natures, which can turn a useful, critical eye on the person's nature at the edge. This type of edge facilitation means developing a form of tough love, increasing awareness at the edge by not necessarily providing relief, but holding the pain or tension of our most difficult encounters with nature with compassion, wisdom and sobriety.

Notes

1. In discussion during the 1993 Extreme States Seminar in Waldport, Oregon, Amy Mindell described addiction as a process whereby the individual "tunnels" under the edge, or bypasses a block, difficulty or complex by using a substance or behavior.
2. This article, though written by one author, is a group endeavor that owes an incalculable debt to fellow students, colleagues and teachers. It expands upon and tries to synthesize the theories, ideas, and applications of myself and fellow practitioners. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my main teachers—Amy and Amy Mindell, Max Schupbach and Joe Goodbread—whose work and research continually enrich process theory. I would especially like to acknowledge Amy Mindel’s research and practice of therapy, in particular his work on addictions, high and low dreams, and altered states; Max Schupbach, for many of my ideas were stimulated by watching his impeccable facilitation and teaching; and Amy Mindell, whose work on case supervision and metacommunication has contributed to the background of these ideas.
3. Second attention is a term used to denote a form of disciplined awareness of those aspects of reality we typically ignore or deem insignificant. The term comes from Carlos Castaneda's books on his apprenticeship with the Yaqui shaman, Don Juan Matus.
4. Max Schupbach, Training Seminar, Thredbo, Australia, November 15-17,1995.
5. Don Juan says that for the warrior, there are two states of consciousness—the tonal, the world of daily reality, and the nagual, the rest of reality, which is only accessed through acts of power.
6. The concept of metaskills was developed by Amy Mindell. See Metaskills: The Spiritual Art of Therapy.
7. Max Schupbach (Supervision Seminar, Fall 1994, Portand, Oregon) used the distinction between therapizing and facilitating in relation to working with couples, families and groups. He explained that the therapist working with a couple or group should facilitate the communication between the people, helping them with edges, rather than helping each person over their edge. In other words, the interaction itself, and not the therapist per se, is what helps people over their edges.

References

Castaneda, Carlos. The Second Ring of Power. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1977.

Mindell, Amy. Metaskills: The Spiritual Art of Therapy. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1995.

Mindell, Arnold. The Shaman's Body. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.

Julie Diamond, Ph.D., teaches and practices process work in Portland and world wide. She has been an enthusiastic devotee of process theory and ideas for the past 16 years and is the author of a book on social-linguistics, Status and Power in Verbal Interaction.