Robert has a Masters Degree in Social Work. He has been in private practice for thirty years. While he believes credentials are important, he considers his extensive training, more than three decades of experience, and many years of his own self-exploration in therapy, to be most relevant.

Robert has almost forty years of training in Buddhist meditation and has been teaching Insight Meditation (Vipassana or Mindfulness) for thirty years. He is the founder and guiding teacher of the Portland Insight Meditation Community. Soon after he began his meditation practice he became interested in psychotherapy as a Western way of helping people grow and experience greater meaning and happiness. His life's work has been the integration of the techniques of mind and heart development that have arisen in the East with the psychotherapies emerging in the West.

Robert has had thirty years of training and supervision in numerous Western psychotherapies: Gestalt, Bio-Energetics, Hakomi Body-Centered, Ericksonian Hypnosis, Transactional Analysis, Systemic Family Therapy, and Psychdynamic Therapy.

He meets each person as a respected, valued and unique individual. He invites them to describe what they wish to accomplish, or what weighs heavily in their heart. The medical model is useful in some cases, but he prefers to see clients as people with enormous resources that they can access with caring assistance. The therapy is a mutual exploration. It may entail only a session or two, or may evolve into several months or years. Robert has clients who return to see him a decade or more after finishing their work when some life event requires another period of support and unfolding.

Most of Robert's clients are interested in using meditation or some other discipline to enhance the work done in the office. Establishing a personal meditative practice also allows one to continue to nurture psychological, emotional and spiritual growth for the rest of one's life.

Doctors and mental health professionals refer many of his clients for meditation training. These clients seek meditation skills for stress management, psychological/emotional growth, or in response to existential questions and spiritual longings.

The best, and perhaps only, way to determine if it will be possible to do effective healing work with a therapist is to meet with them. In their presence one can experience their approach and determine if there is a "fit".

For further information, or to schedule an appointment,
please contact Robert Beatty at 503-223-2214.

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