Richard Bandler was invited by the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, to attend, record and transcribe a teaching seminar of family therapist Virginia Satir. He was later hired to assist Spitzer edit one of gestalt therapist Fritz Perls' books, The Gestalt Approach (1973) and to assist with checking transcripts for Eye Witness to Therapy (1973). According to Spitzer, "[Bandler] came out of it talking and acting like Fritz Perls".
While Bandler was a student at University of California, Santa Cruz he also led a Gestalt therapy group. John Grinder, who came to observe, said to Bandler that he could explain almost all of the questions and comments Bandler made using transformational grammar, the topic in linguistics that Grinder specialized in. They developed a model for therapy and called it the meta-model. It became their first book, The Structure of Magic, Volume I (1975). Bandler was Gregory Bateson's landlord, who taught at UCSC, Kresge College as did Grinder, and had moved to a community on Alba Road near the Santa Cruz mountains community of Ben Lomond. Bateson would have a profound influence on Bandler's future, he introduced Bandler and Grinder to Milton Erickson, which formed some of the foundational models for Neuro-linguistic programming In 1975 Bandler then formed his own publishing company, Meta Publications, and published Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson Volume I (1975).
Bandler and Grinder went on to author The Structure of Magic Volume II (1976), Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson Volume II (1977) and Changing With Families (1976), which was co-authored with Virginia Satir herself.
Bandler also modeled Israeli physicist and founder of the Feldenkrais school of body work, Moshe Feldenkrais, and later published his book "The Elusive Obvious". In many of his classes, he has taught elements of this form of bodywork which he modeled.
