[This is an extract from Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening, a new book offering modalities for nondual therapy by Georgi Y. Johnson. The book introduces and explains the notion of physical, emotional and mental contraction based on energetic splits into dualities and offers nondual qualities that having a healing power in unfolding contractions and trauma back into the flow of the living psyche in naturalness.]
MOTHER, FATHER & CHILD
The partner of mother is father.
The child has no opposite.
In the child, father and mother are one.
Regardless of sexual orientation, all of us are children to a mother and father. In this, the child is the nondual position of mother and father. In broad terms, we will even see in expressionist brushstrokes the duality that attracted mother and father together expressed as a nondual elixir in the child. For example: a mother who is expressing a lot of shame can be paired with a father who expresses disgust. The child born to them could have a strong quality of purity – that inherent quality to which both shame and disgust seek reconnection. This rough formula is both brings insight to the formational years of the child’s psyche and can give direction in terms of the needed bridge to liberation for the child, as the mother and father are fully alive in them, regardless of the quality or degree of contact.
As contractions tend to work through the domino effect, there will often be several reflections. For example, in addition to the conflict around purity, we might find that the mother is possessive and the father abandoning – reflecting through the child in a strong quality of care. The meta-dualities will also play out. The dynamic between war and surrender, for example, will evoke peace in the child – the child born to somehow bring peace to a conflictual relationship.
This is one of 35 energetic contractions in the psyche detailed in the book Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening.
Often, the evolution of mastery in form around nondual qualities will have a thread that continues through generations, both through the maternal and paternal line and dancing between the genders. We will find families where life forms express degrees of mastery around the quality of freedom, for example, often with repeating themes of slavery and liberation, where the true nature of the quality irrespective of form is liberated.
The child in us is a sacred resource, and is often severed in the timeline through the intense years of puberty. That is, it is common to relate to childhood memory as if it were another person, and great shifts occur when the client is able to fully regress as the same ‘one’ as the child, rather than as a detached witness. This kind of regression involves direct re-experiencing of intimate atmospheres. These atmospheres will in their purity be pre-natal, as the first impressions and biochemical stress patterns arising in awareness in unity with the mother.
Access to the pre-lingual, responsive, spatial dimension of childhood impressions and atmospheres can be opened through moving through the timeline and recognizing the timeless ‘one’ in the childhood memory as the same ‘one’ that now sits as an adult in the now, and the same ‘one’ that will be experiencing the next day, and the last days of physical life.
MOTHER (Receptive)
The somatic template of the feeling connection to our inner mother is sourced in the spectrum of qualities and contractions alive in our own physical mother at the time of pregnancy and in infancy. While conventional schools of psychology will rarely admit that pre-lingual and pre-natal experience effects the psyche, in Nondual Healing these early vibrations in awareness are found to be formational. These are the essential atmospheres of home, the moods and attitudes that form states, seemingly inseparable from all experience.
As these primal vibrations are both the background and soil to all other experiences, they play a formational role through each contraction. While we can penetrate them at any moment, it is through the liberation of the nondual position of pure, unentangled awareness that they can emerge to the foreground. Sometimes called the dark-night of the soul, these subtle mists need to be realized as a relative and non-absolute and not as a fundamental part of experience in order for the process of self-realization to liberate the core of many contractions.
Such core atmospheres resonate with contractions around the nondual position of home (where the duality of familiarity and strangeness moves in contraction). They form as filters over consciousness itself, like the proverbial rose-pink sunglasses, or the perception of the world through clouded windows. Indeed, post-awakening, many will report the temporary lifting of these filters. Everything is seen as more alive, the light seems to have greater purity and colors are more vibrant.
When we are in the womb and in early infancy, we are in total biochemical unity with the mother. It is not only the conscious patterns of stress that imprint through vibration into our psychic physiology, but also the unconscious. In this, the full blend with the energetic patterns of the mother are also a blend with the mother’s mother and onwards, each womb containing the next. Indeed, the very law of attraction that led us to be conceived in form through her would have been the attraction towards a nondual quality in that moment, around which contractions are spiralling.
The formation of the psyche in utero is based on patterns of stress, harmony and dissonance, patterns experience first hand as identical to the core of the human self by the unborn child. The mother is not separate, but she is the gateway to the physical life and in this she is as fundamental as the whole universe.
After birth, the psyche continues to be formed by patterns of harmony and dissonance, with an increasing emphasis on patterns of separation. Birth, the great rupture from the mother’s body, is followed by reunion, but within this unity there is already a distance and the possibility of loss. The patterning of separation and disconnection is already forming the borders and sensitivities of the separate self, and the child’s later ability to stay in unity regardless of spatial distance and later, regardless of different feelings and perspectives.
The first patterns of dissonance or separation are experienced as the agony of rejection. This pain can be so uncontainable that an energetic freeze forms directly around the purity of love that connects mother and child. This can mean that in later life, vibrations of that love of the same frequency as the mother’s love create feelings of repulsion and compulsion. Beyond rationality enemies form in the social field, simply because of the resonance with this very early freezing of love.
Much has been written about the mother wound and the complex of dynamics for daughters in finding form in later life. Issues of loyalty and betrayal can feature strongly as the daughter chooses to express her freedom into the world where the mother remained enslaved. Rejection of daughters by mothers and vice versa can take tangible form as daughters strive to form happy relationships (or choose to leave unhappy ones) or endeavour successful careers.
Complications around the mother wound are still more harsh for males. While many daughters can retain the sense of unity with the mother while moving into separate form and without falling into symbiotic repetition of the mothers ‘law’, males are born in disconnection. From the moment gender is declared they are delineated as separate from the mother and begin to be formed in the role of perpetrator. This existential guilt in their being the essential cause of disconnection from the mother (universe) can widen the dimension of despair suffused with a sense of perennial condemnation. As a male they are at root cause of the mother’s sacrifice. Between the expectation that they will correct this pain and the impossibility of finding gender differentiation within unity, they can’t make it good for her. As a successful male (becoming the oppressor), they betray her, and as an unsuccessful one they disappoint her. They are damned if they do, damned if they don’t: disconnected from the source of all they are in human form.
In many instances, we are talking about a whole category of inherited trauma. To the post-traumatic slave syndrome, referred to in the chapter on Freedom, we could add post-traumatic gender syndrome. It is recent history that our mothers were sometimes incarcerated as insane simply because their husband wanted a divorce. A social field in which loss of a husband meant loss of livelihood, poverty and shame still leaves its patterns today. A single woman is designated a threat to family units, and a child-less woman is either pitied or socially estranged. These dynamics of oppression continue in many places in the world in physical form, and everywhere else energetically. They effect both mother and father, as well as the mother and father energy within ourselves. The healing opportunity is found in the birth of every fresh form – in every child and within the child that resonates as a beacon of light at the core of each of us.
FATHER (Active)
While the mother is the connection to the source, universe; or final relaxation, opening and receptivity in the psyche, the father is the active principle. The mother suffuses the inner world, while the father suffuses the so-called outer world. He is the template for activity, manifestation, and for ‘reality’ itself. Out of unity with the mother, the father is the first significant ‘other’. He stands for authority, law, and safety. He is often the bottom-line for the physical survival of the family unit.
In this the patterns of judgement of the father can seem to be absolute and can form beliefs around the nature of God the father (the fearful one, the absent one). These beliefs can be somatic, emasculating the son and robbing the daughter of her natural movement through time and space. Contractions around the nondual quality of Authority (inner authorship of our own reality) express through the duality of conformity and rebellion through every movement into the ‘outer’ world as well as in patterns of intimate relating. This contraction effects the flow of expression and by default the ability to receive. To say it simply, contractions around fatherhood directly effects our ability to manifest, to take form, and to dance in the world of duality.
While the mother wound spirals around the horror of betrayal, father wounds typically resonate around fears of abandonment and the pain of injustice. Yet so fundamental are the formational roles of the mother, father and the atmosphere of home on the psyche of each child, that each network of contractions is unique, just as each personality is unique.
CHILD: Nondual Quality
The nondual quality of the child has been reframed in current conditioning to the point of abuse. Dominant educational systems and culture rest on the premise that the child is a kind of untrained mammal, whose brain is inherently hollow. Left untamed, this mind will lead to bestiality – unbridled sexuality, violence, untold social offences and destruction. Similar misconceptions surround the nondual quality of the child as infuse our perceptions of freedom. These misconceptions rest on the premise that our true nature is cruel.
The unborn infant, the baby and the child are actually chiefly resting in pure awareness, out of which a naturalness of care, responsivity, connection and peace arise in and of themselves, without any need for inculcation. The mind of the child is akin to what Zen Buddhism has called: Beginners Mind. Unfettered by the conditioning of past, present and future; free of the agenda of perception that distorts consciousness with expectation, the child’s senses open out directly on the world with a freshness that is beyond selectivity. The child does not seek to make sense of what he or she sees. Rather, the child is the sensing itself.
In this chapter, we have touched on some of the afflictions connected to the male and female aspects of ourselves, as reflected through the father and the mother. These afflictions play out through limitations on movement through the world of duality. For example: they can block the cycle of receptivity and expression; they can create filters of atmospheric states on consciousness itself (such as an attitude of negativity); they can disturb the freedom in finding unique form while resting in unity.
These core colourings and patterns of the psyche can feel heavy, yet the child is not residing in them. In childhood, these patterns of loneliness and intimacy, abandonment and possession, strangeness and familiarity are surface textures to a universe filled with nondual quality. For the child, the story-line caught in time is mostly an abstraction. The habits of time, story, expectation, history, agenda and excuses are learned later. The child resides as the undivided, spatial, nondual quality of pure awareness. Within this awareness there are patterns of dissonance: rejection, stress, loss and discomfort. Yet this dissonance is relating to the world of form, a form of the psyche that is hardly developed and is in not yet confused as absolute. That is, the personality of the child is a kind of play-ground, just as even his or her name is a label that needs to be learned. The child is still free.
The perspective of the child is often one that brings shame. Just as so many of the nondual qualities have been distorted through popular conditioning, qualities of purity, innocence, freedom, trust, care, love and even peace are seen as weak, naïve and ‘childish’. To call someone ‘childish’ is to insult them. It seems we live in a culture where adulthood and maturity is often determined by the degree of contraction and separation from the source of ourselves as well as from each other.
The reclaiming of at least part of the inner child in order to have him or her open as a resource and guide is an important part of every process of freedom from contraction. The child is an inseparable resource of the whole, through which we emerge into physical life and through which we depart. Alive as the perfect blend between male and female aspects, the nondual position of the child can be the key that will unlock freedom of form and movement through releasing the dualities of push & pull, male & female, creation & destruction at a source level. Pure perception through the senses of the child are our first and last resource in living a human life cycle. We would do well to rest in it.
Form does not differ from the Child.
And the Child does not differ from Form.
Form is the Child and the Child is Form.
When father and mother dissolve, the Child is emerging.
See also: For Love of the Inner Child: Thich Nhat Hanh
