Non-Dual Therapy

“Non-duality” is a word that points to the wholeness and oneness of all of life before it becomes refracted into the “diversity and multiplicity” of life that is experienced in the world. The direct experience of this wholeness and oneness is a throughline of human experience throughout all cultures and all of human history. It has been experienced and described (although all words fall short)  in innumerable cultural and religious traditions, including Taoism, Dzogchen (Tibetan Buddhism), Advaita Vedanta and Shamanic traditions everywhere. 

When a therapist is grounded in the direct knowing of this wholeness and oneness, there is a compassionate holding of ultimate rightness in any situation. A knowing that every upset is an opportunity for wholeness to remember itself– a dance of life, playing hide and seek with itself. A troubled mind is just as much an expression of the perfection of source as is any other manifestation in form. Healing then becomes a remembering of the original nature of wholeness. 

For those of us with intense, complex and devastating environmental illnesses, such as lyme and coinfections, mold illness, autoimmune diseases and Alzheimer’s dementia, simply “remembering” wholeness is only the beginning of the healing. Where can the “ultimate rightness” be found in extended, exhausting, excruciating, dismantling illness? 

I promise it is there. Underneath. Even in a life like this, one that catalyzes every mammalian instinct for survival to resist the painful experience, it is there.

“Awakening” in this context means the realization that who you really are is the space within which your mind arises. Once you realize that you are not your mind, you are not your thoughts, but the spacious, loving awareness within which all your thoughts and perceptions arise, something shifts.

Once you stop looking to the frantic, panicked mind for solutions, solutions start to come from the spacious, loving awareness instead. That’s when grace begins to guide your healing. That’s when the solutions start to come from the right place, the right people and in the right order. Support arrives. Obstacles dissolve. 

Ultimately, healing means removing everything that is not who you really are. You are not your ego, you are not your infection, your contamination, your emotion or your dysfunction. Each tissue in your body has a native resonant frequency. When it becomes unburdened from the confounding influences of infections, exposures and trauma, its native, unadulterated expression is revealed. It is life itself. 

 “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

– Adyashanti

Illness is a path to Awakening. Awakening is a path of healing. If your mental and emotional paradigm is not leading to healing, open to others. Surrender to the intelligence of life itself and gently hold your mind like you might hold a tantruming child for the moment. Just this one moment. And this one…

This is what has worked for regaining my health after repeated devastation.

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Explore more about Non-dual Therapy:

Georgi Y. Johnson– The True Nature of Healing

Nic Higham– What is Nondual Therapy?

Rupert Spira– Therapy and Non-Dual Understanding

Peter Fenner- Non-duality and Therapy