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“Nic speaks from the depths of his heart, sharing the profound and ancient message of non-duality in a simple, human, and very down-to-earth way. He doesn’t just lecture about Oneness; through his work in mental health he has been ‘putting theory into practise’ for many years now. With incredible patience, Nic meets with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds who are often in profound distress, and brings deep listening and loving presence, which I believe are the foundations of true healing.” ~ Jeff Foster

 

About Nondual Therapy with Nic Higham

Within human life (especially in our formative years) experiences take place in which we disconnect from ourselves, from our intrinsic worth, and the eternal moment. Periods of fear and trauma become stored in our bodies, and we often become motivated by these unconscious energies until we are ready to look at them. Everybody has patterns and habits that keep suffering alive. Maybe you’ve needed to suppress or numb painful things because you just haven’t been able to deal with them.

One thing prevents the healthy change and growth you deserve: not meeting the parts of yourself that sustain the status quo. Freedom becomes apparent when we can notice the beliefs that bind us, name how they’re in place, and then navigate their release.

By becoming more conscious of our suffering and meeting it as it shows up, we can integrate it, lessen its charge, and undo the web of false identification. When we meet and integrate things as they are, we build a trusting relationship with ourselves and with life (which, according to the message of nonduality, are the same).

Nondual Therapy helps gently direct and maintain attention on the source of this suffering to help release or soften the charge. Symptoms of distress, along with our feelings about them, can be understood as messengers coming to share something meaningful. In Nondual Therapy, we listen, feel and observe.

Therapy is about healing and true healing is about rediscovering nonduality – our natural wholeness – after all, suffering is based on the misperception of separateness. The term Nonduality (or Advaita) is used to attempt to express the ‘ground of all being’, that life, and its expressions are One. “Nonduality” doesn’t mean “against duality”; it’s not meant to imply that duality is bad. Instead, nonduality is both the Deep Knowing of inseparability and an entire embrace of passing paradox. It’s the supreme balancing of the opposites. It’s authentic connection. It’s realisation. It’s unconditional love.

The pressures of human life produce internal reactions, of which we are completely unaware. By identifying and meeting internal ‘energetic knots’ (bundles of feelings, sensations, images, thoughts) consciously, we soften or release their effect in the unconscious. By shifting the focus of awareness from the conscious body to the whole body-mind we liberate symptoms of their need to call out to us in painful ways and reveal what they are trying to communicate. We no longer fight, avoid or reject the parts of ourselves that need attention, and in the process, we uncover our natural wholeness.

Nondual Therapy acknowledges our eternal true Self as the origin and resting place of all transient forms. Nic Higham offers a mindfulness, somatic, experiential, spiritual and relational approach accessible to anyone open to deeply exploring themselves and a hunger for truth.

Find the capacity to attend to thoughts, feelings and sensations, and utilise special therapeutic and spiritual tools and practise to release pain, trauma and suffering. Come to realise and trust in a deeply embodied way that awareness itself holds every flavour of experience and know yourself as that unlimited, loving capacity. Discover a clearing for your suffering and recognise that it was never actually “yours”. Beliefs are seen with new clarity and denied or hidden feelings are met with compassionate openness.

“We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we are masters. Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discover and understand its causes and its workings, we overcome it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves when brought into the conscious. The dissolution of the unconscious releases energy; the mind feels adequate and become quiet.” 

– Nisargadatta Maharaj

“To reach the deeper layers of suffering you must go to its roots and uncover their vast underground network, where fear and desire are closely interwoven and the currents of life’s energy oppose, obstruct and destroy each other… This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind.”

– Nisargadatta Maharaj

As we journey deeper inward into a place where things are revealed, experience is transformed or transmuted. As you deepen into loving presence, you will dismantle false limitations and beliefs about yourself and life. When painful experience is embraced in presence, it is liberated and energy is freed.

Nondual Therapy is neither about achievement, improvement or fixing something. Rather than trying to heal the personality, Nondual Therapy sees individuality as one unique expression of Source. As these energetic blocks are made of stuck emotion and pain, freedom starts with allowing feelings to be felt with open curiosity. Nondual Therapy isn’t about denying the appearance of anything or about reaching a conclusion about things; it’s an opportunity to explore your thoughts and feelings about yourself, life and others to see where there are unexplored assumptions and beliefs functioning. It is about becoming deeply and intimately present with ourselves and allowing space for all those ego knots and tangles to unravel. It’s about having the space for anything that needs attention to arise in its own time and way to be met, understood, connected with and released.

Sessions with Nic Higham provide a much-needed space for the unfolding or unravelling of the web of mind-body conditioning to bring true Self to the forefront. Every thought, emotion and sensation are allowed to be as they are providing natural healing and balance. Nic uses a blend of psychotherapy, coaching, guided nondual meditation, somatic inquiry self-inquiry (as taught by Ramana Maharshi), spiritual psychology, and Nisarga Yoga (as taught by Nisargadatta Maharaj).

Gentle, yet profound and transformational, the therapeutic relationship guides and holds space supports the release of energetic contractions (bundles of sensation, mental images, thoughts, memories, self-concepts). The more we develop the ability to allow the unfolding of contractions in the psyche, through the cessation of grasping and aversion, the more our authentic nature (what Nisargadatta Maharaj called ‘nisarga’) becomes apparent. This process frees natural clarity, harmony, truth, freedom, safety, and points back to the existential home you never left. It brings forth and directs the healing light of awareness, through silence, listening and resonance. All that needs healing is the assumption of separation.

Professional therapeutic and spiritual support with:

• Locating and integrating energetic, emotional and/or physical blockages
• Realising limiting beliefs and false identities
• Finding freedom from compulsions/addictions
• Attending to unhealed wounds/trauma
• Freedom from the suffering of anxiety/stress, depression, loss
• Contact directly your true nature
• Integrating and making sense of nondual realisations, spiritual insights and awakening
• Learning how to meditate and inquire to explore and dismantle limitation and falsity
• Using somatic, energy and embodiment approaches to locate and embody awareness in the body
• Being mindful to avoid ‘spiritually bypassing’
• Identify, process and heal blockages of suffering and trauma (including intergenerational pain and narratives)
• Moving beyond old, conditioned attempts to control or perfect your life
• Integrate any abandoned, neglected or rejected parts

 

Nondual Mentoring

Like a bright light in a dark room, mentoring with Nic Higham is a space for deepening into nondual realisation.

Nondual spirituality, when removed from personal life, can become dry and a means for bypassing the relative, just as personal life can be painful and limiting when removed from the expansive depth of spiritual realisation.

Many spiritual seekers want to know how to stop suffering, to find peace, and how to progress in their life or path, or to stop seeking. Simplification and reassurance can be invaluable here but are challenging to find. There are many nondual paths offered nowadays, and it can feel overwhelming to fathom which one to take. Often the more complex a spiritual teaching system is, the less wisdom and truth it contains. And as most find out, there’s a big difference between mind-based knowledge and “deep knowing”, and until you have transcended knowledge and seen beyond the mind, will nonduality truly resonate. Once it does, however, it will touch you profoundly. Such is the stunning simplicity of the realised state.

Meeting with Nic Higham throughout a series of six sessions, you will learn to identify apparent barriers to awakening and dissolve them as you come to stabilise in consciousness. Greater harmony between authentic understanding and daily life will blossom. Moving beyond the ego, you will start to witness the present moment and discern all that you are not so to have clarity and conviction about your natural state (what Nisargadatta Maharaj calls ‘Nisarga’). When you are liberated from thought and the subtle layers of conditioning, you will discover the unconditional love and contentment of the changeless. However, it isn’t necessary to stop thinking or feeling or even to become free. When we know we are already nisarga, facets of experience and conditioning still arise, but they no longer define or restrict us.

Drawing on key principles of the enlightenment traditions, Nondual Mentoring presents the direct (pathless) way to liberation and transcendence without the adornments, trappings, methods, rituals, or distracting features within many spiritual systems. Sessions are bespoke, meeting you were you are and focusing on what is most important to you. Using straightforward English and a no-nonsense approach, Nic will keep bringing you back to the same core truth: your true nature is beyond the body-mind. And for this realisation, we ask ‘Who am I?’ in various creative ways. The answer is already within you, or more precisely, the answer is you. As Nisargadatta Maharaj said, you are That.

Nic is down-to-earth, caring and devoted and will hold space that is heart-opening and transformative while you reflect, explore questions, and inquire into truth.

Is this you?

• You’ve read some nonduality or spiritual books and have listened to many spiritual teachers talk about awareness and awakening
• You’ve had some glimpses of insight but feel lost or stuck
• You want to move beyond an intellectual understanding
• You’re not sure if you’re meditating or inquiring “correctly”
• You want to stop searching
• You want to discover what seems to veil deep knowing
• You want to take a deeper look into this stuff, get some clarity, and work through what seems to be holding you back from knowing, being and living your true Self
• You want to embody the Truth pointed to through the message of nonduality
• You want to cultivate a meditative state of mind in all areas of life, not just while you are meditating
• You want to understand what is meant by the ‘I Am’
• You’d benefit from ‘post-awakening-integration.’
• You need practical and clear spiritual guidance
• Need help with clearing up spiritual inconsistencies and contradictions you’ve been confused by for some time
• Need spiritual / nondual teaching simplifying

Nic Higham is a nonduality author, certified counsellor and life coach. Based in Leicester, UK, he offers face-to-face and online sessions working as a nondual therapist. Nic’s work is guided by over 15 years of immersion in the teaching of Nisargadatta Maharaj, and professional training therapeutic modalities, combined with a deep knowing of nondual awareness. He advocates no method or spiritual or religious system but is influenced by the key principles of ‘Nisarga Yoga’ as presented in Nisargadatta’s book ‘I Am That’:

• Non-identification and right understanding
• Interest and earnestness
• Spontaneity and effortlessness
• Attentiveness to ‘I Am’
• Right action
• Going within to go beyond
• Awareness of Self

What Is Nonduality?

You’ve inherited the belief that everything beyond your skin is not you or yours, that you’re limited to, and by, your personal internal world and the body that imprisons it. You’ve claimed and lost certain objects and people as your own on your journey. Your “possessions” have become extensions of your sense of individuality, providing distraction from your deeper existential separateness but not curing it. Your belief in a boundaried identity grew stronger as you matured and individuated, while those around you reinforced your distinctiveness. You were given a name and your parents or primary caregivers co-designed your personality. From a young age, you’ve believed that you must strive to establish and uphold your unique place in the world. That’s what you’ve been told. Our society considers these ideas to be the norm and stigmatises any contrary notions, avoiding and rejecting them for fear of losing oneself.

Experientially, your body and individuality set you apart from other people and objects. This happens in a paradigm of relating and interacting as a human, which you might have experienced as interpersonal isolation and loneliness. On a deeper level, it’s imagined duality which creates all manner of separateness—from the kind I call “dualistic isolation,” the sense that you’re identified with and alone in your body and your mind, to “existential loneliness,” a persistent sense of incompleteness that no amount of social or material connection can resolve. Bearing and inquiring into this alternative domain is a doorway to meeting our oneness.

As I write in my nonduality book, Living the Life That You Are, in a multitude of ways we seek an end to the brokenness we experience and with which we have wrongly but innocently identified. ‘Nonduality‘ simply means ‘not two’, or ‘one without a second’, and points to the fundamental wholeness of life.

Nondual wisdom refers to the direct experience of a fundamental awareness that is the ground beneath apparent distinction. The divide between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ is an essentially mental story.

This understanding is at the core of Hindu Vedanta, some schools of Buddhism, and Taoism, and mystical Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It’s not a progressive approach to attain something that is in a future, but to achieve and unfold what we already are. Nonduality is the nonideological, nonreligious, nondogmatic eternal truth that is already present.

“Nonduality” doesn’t mean “against duality”; it’s not meant to imply that duality is bad. Instead, nonduality is both the Deep Knowing of inseparability and an entire embrace of passing paradox. It’s the supreme balancing of the opposites. It’s authentic connection. It’s realisation. It’s unconditional love.

We rarely see that the parts of life we favour wouldn’t exist without their “complementary” aversions. This is the play of duality. It’s what gives life colour, texture, and meaning. Therefore, it’s not the diverse expressions of life that cause our suffering but our attempts to pursue one oppositional extreme—either yin or yang, not both. Yin and yang, however, are seamless counterparts and perfectly embodied by their context.

There is a life that lies beyond the laws of conditionality and linearity, beyond time and space, beyond the dualistic stories we tell ourselves. Sadly, we hide this life from view by guarding against the extinguishing of our individuality. We – you – are that very life.

What Is Yoga?

Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuating states of the mind. With the essential help of consciousness, the mind acknowledges the limitations of its own nature and deconstructs itself through inquiry. The goal of yoga is to liberate consciousness from its embroilment with the mind in order to deepen and broaden our awareness of our true Self.

It’s possible to fine-tune the focus of immediate consciousness through the technology of meditation and Self-inquiry. The essence of meditation and inquiry practise is mindfulness. When mindfulness is radical, meditation has the potential to make clear that we are, and inquiry can make clear what we are. This fusion of “that” and “what” is powerful, transformative, and illuminating.

The body-mind is a vehicle and an instrument for manifesting consciousness—that palpable sense and knowledge of “I am”, beingness” or “presence” that we know either subtly or strongly. We habitually focus consciousness toward the mind and its contents, therefore emphasising them and distorting our fundamental sense of “I am.”

What is Nisarga Yoga?

Nisarga Yoga of the great Advaita (nonduality) master Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897 – 1981), is a natural and simple way of approaching life. Our body-mind recognises and connects with its own ‘I am-ness’, not as an ‘I am someone’ or ‘I am something’ but simply as pure timeless being. The core of Nisarga Yoga is to meditate on the ‘I am’ and inquire into its source. For this beingness must have an ultimate origin from which it flows and to which it eventually returns – our true Self, the Absolute.

To correct the misconception of who or what think we are, we must fully understand the patterns of the mind and turn it into a tool of Self-remembrance. Living life mindfully and effortlessly in full awareness and spontaneity, being deeply interested in life cultivate the heart of Nisarga Yoga. No longer unconscious or passive, we become conscious and engaged in consciousness itself.

In this dwelling on consciousness or the sense of ‘I am’, dependence, preparation or initiation are unnecessary. But refraining from hurting others – what Nisargadatta Maharaj calls ‘harmlessness’ – is the most powerful and fruitful practice. Rather than a mere spiritual practice, Nisarga Yoga is the art of living in peace, harmony, friendliness and love, all of which are the qualities of the sattva guna.

We must meet and be with our own inner life, learn from it, follow it, embrace it, and give it our earnest focus. Nisargadatta Maharaj reassures us we need no other guide. Our steadfast desire for Truth beyond worldly knowledge influences our daily life and a quiet equanimity becomes apparent. The fruit of Nisarga Yoga is unconditional happiness. “Normal” life continues, but is seen to be spontaneous and unbound, meaningful and contented.