What is this miracle of being here as a human? Is this only a spiritual question, or is it also a psychological one? Isn’t our psyche (Greek origin, ‘Soul’) the direct manifestation and the field of experience for all things ‘spiritual’?
Yasmin draws her breath. She has been in Nondual Therapy for some months after years of failed treatment for depression left her on the edge of suicide. The multiple rapes from her family in the Middle East; the life-threats, humiliations, and beatings had left her frozen. After a spiritual awakening, she is now in a process of self-realization, piece by piece, unfolding the psyche back to the existential esteem of True Nature.
But that day, she’s different. She looks terrified, as if I might beat her. After a period of small-talk about the Nondual source, she begins to relax. She’s breathing shallowly and keeps averting her eyes. It’s painfully awkward for her. Softly, with unconquerable helplessness and purity, a core suffering begins to sing. It’s the terror of the unspeakable, and she’s speaking it out. She’s telling of the stunned horror of violation in becoming aware as a brutalized girl that her mother was aroused by spying on her in the shower. Beyond the long history of rape and violence from the men in her family, a crack in the normative personality is now opening to reveal an even darker field of betrayal and loss – a break in the sacred connection of trust between mother and child.
Yet Yasmin accessed the existential quality of trust to tell me her experience. She endured the unendurable, and with one awareness, we surrounded the ineffable vibration of horror buried deeply and intimately within her psyche, feeling it together. This was the session where Yasmin became liberated of sexual slavery and began to anyway live in purity; to anyway allow the love for her children; and to anytime rest in boundless peace. Through shared awareness, and speaking the unspeakable, a golden road of compassion opened towards her own personality, that includes her mother and her mother’s mother, as well as all victims of the treacherous conflict between male and female. In that magical moment, Yasmin became free, without conditions, free to continue the collective human path of healing.
Perhaps we can recall those moments when we meet another human being in the authentic core of suffering. Out of the isolation of pain, a subtle wonder is opened, where the precise resonance of suffering is experienced in togetherness. Such moments sustain and empower us, opening strength to face the inconceivable, endure the unendurable, and gain insight into what seemed unknowable. These are moments when the ‘me’ and ‘you’ dissolve even beyond the edge of intimacy. There is no therapist, no client, just ‘this’.
When we feel deeply seen, heard and felt by another person, it brings tremendous comfort. Stress loses its tyranny over our system and the possibility of relaxation beyond the sense of isolation means our awareness can expand beneath, beyond, above and behind fixed patterns of emotional reactivity. In such moments, where the consciousness in two rests as one, we’re born again.
This is part of the magic that happens in every therapeutic encounter. Out of compassion, empathy emerges and when empathy disappears and the two become one in the resonance of being alive, healing is happening. Every human being intuitively knows how to hold space for the experience of another, even without diplomas. Yet in Nondual Therapy, there is a paradigm shift in recognition. Silence is not a forced, non-interference, but rather it’s a pluripotent resource, an invitation to fall into the felt sense of ‘being’. Consciousness is not a brain function, but is beyond both thought and agenda, suffused with healing power. Peace is not a side-effect of problem solving, but is the resource through which painful divisions unfold and resolve. .
Nondual Therapy has emerged at a critical junction in our evolution. On the one hand, the treatment of psychological suffering with psychiatric medication can be ineffective and anaesthetizing. On the other, the levels of stress, depression, loneliness and despair throughout the western world are becoming epidemic. Britain has even opened a Ministry of Loneliness to try and fix the agony of the belief in separate identity. Yes, the suffering of the illusion of the separate self now has its own governmental department in the land of the Brexit (although the country has never been so crowded).
Nondual Therapy rests on four corners of insight, which are unconsciously at play through all healing modalities. It brings this world-view to the foreground, offering a kind of liberation in human experience that is beyond all frontiers of separate identity.
Negation is an illusion
It’s impossible to undo, uncreate, or extinguish anything that has happened or that is already happening. This sounds simple, yet it has tremendous psychological consequences. How much energy do we invest denying our anger, in fear of our fear, and/or pretending to be someone other than the miracle of what we are in naturalness at** any moment. Denial, repression and
suppression are recognized as part of the suffering dynamic of all psychological schools, yet often, those same schools invest in the idea that the personality is a stable identity and that it can be improved, conformed or better conditioned to make life easier. Nondual Therapy honours and recognizes the integrity of all experience in the moment, including all emotions, including those feeling sensations (such as jealousy, hatred and destructiveness) that we would all rather avoid
Our purpose is evolutionary
In conventional therapy, qualities such as peacefulness, an open heart, a silent mind or a sense of freedom are often seen as amicable side-effects to a process of conditioning the personality into social compatibility. Nondual Therapy works the other way around. It acknowledges what it calls ‘Nondual Qualities’ or the qualities of consciousness as the deeper source of all identity and personality. Thanks to the psychological dissonance of our era, many are awakening to this True Nature and to its qualities. Some speak of unbounded awareness, other of the infinite quality of love; some teach freedom, others the resource of silence. Some open the channel of existential purity, others of gratitude. These qualities are prioritize by Nondual Therapy as accelerators of healing. Clients are encouraged to move into their frequency through connection (either within their personal experience or outside of themselves in nature, or in others).
Nondual Therapy is based on the insight that we share the same life, and that we’re all expression of one True Nature, although the nature of those expressions is radically unique (It’s a golden ticket, if you like, to the true individuality that never was isolated from the whole).
The resource of True Nature
Nonduality radically recognizes the illusion of the separate self. Nondual Therapy dives into the nature of this illusion. When Nondual insight states that nothing is separate, then how does the illusion of separate individuality arise and what is it made of? Why, even after spiritual awakening to ‘higher consciousness’ do we still suffer, sometimes even more? Here lies the wisdom of Nondual Therapy, which can be found in the phenomena of psychological contraction, which is so close to the miracle (or preservative measure) of creation. Our psychological suffering, including patterns of repetition and negative states can be understood through the simply metaphor of what a muscle does when it’s shocked: it contracts. Yet what is contracting psychologically is the flow of True Nature. To quote the book, Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening:
“Out of seamless unity, pure stillness or the omnipresence of silence, a need emerges which is a subtle form of primal experience. Experience is a disturbance, a contraction within the whole. In the Jewish Lurianic Kabbalah, creation is described as a process of contraction (‘tzimtzum’ in Hebrew) in which the infinite contracts to allow the concurrent manifestation of the finite. This contraction of primordial light reveals ‘vacant space’ or emptiness which is the facilitator of all form.” (p.18)
Psychologically seen, these contractions show up as experiential flavors of suffering, caught in the polarization of the illusion of the separate self. A contraction of existential innocence, for example, shows up as a stress-related felt sense of guilt and accusation. A contraction of existential purity will be experienced as the duality of shame and disgust. A contraction of existential trust will be experienced as within the energetic duality of loyalty and betrayal.
When the qualities of True Nature can be sensed, the release of the contraction is accelerated, as guilt begins to flow back into innocence, shame into purity and so on. True nature is unpacked as a compendium of healing elixirs for an array of psychological patterns of suffering. The book Nondual Therapy includes a compendium of 35 psychological contractions and the Nondual Qualities into which they are released.
The personality is a temporary, transpersonal expression
Nonduality has a popular tendency to create new dualities, and no forms of ‘spiritual’ personality through the creation of a Nondual, separate self, free of suffering, liberated of all personality. This is clearly a new breed of illusion. Awakened beings suffer, precisely because they are awakened to the suffering that is here, one could even say, awakened to the suffering they experience here.
From the perspective of Nondual Therapy, suffering is an evolutionary service which we share. The transpersonal doesn’t refer to the negation of personality, but rather to the undeniable interconnectedness of all phenomena. That is, your passive aggression in the room, is also sensed by me. In an atmosphere of despair, I will also experience despair (or its partner, hope). The energetic frequencies of emotions and psychological suffering are not left out of the transpersonal field. We’re in it together. What Nondual Therapy does is teach us to dance in the ocean of the human psyche, without sacrificing connection to the source of it all (True Nature, Consciousness, Existence, Life). Nondual Therapy is literally ReSourcing suffering into the omnipresence of True Nature. This means we consolidate in a deeper freedom, which means a freedom to be here, also amid the grief and loss of a human community.
Spiritual teacher Adyashanti has pointed to the magic of compassion that arises in every healing encounter – a compassion that is at source of all possibilities of imaging ourselves to be isolated from the universe. “There’s not necessarily a therapist and a client,” he says, “That doesn’t mean that there’s not therapy taking place.” In the transpersonal field, where therapist and client disappear, healing is happening. Where each felt sensation – whether it be of the most exalted peace, or the darkest night of abandonment – is free of the dualistic divisions of the separate self (meaning it need have no excuse, agenda, subject or object), transformation and reunion with True Nature takes place of itself and as needed. Those are the magical moments. When our client is no longer a client, and they are suddenly, radically free to live.
Georgi Y. Johnson is author of the book Nondual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening. Together with her partner Bart ten Berge, she gives training in Nondual Therapy around the world. She is also available for online mentorship.
