ABOUT NIC HIGHAM

Nic Higham is a nonduality author, counsellor and life coach. Based in Leicester, UK, he offers both face-to-face and online appointments.

Nic completed his counsellor certification in 2009, has undertaken various psychological therapy training courses, and is an Registered Member of British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. He has over a decade of experience working for the NHS (National Health Service) in mental health inpatient care and therapy services and as a mindfulness tutor at an NHS recovery college. While working for the NHS, Nic was elected as a governor and was part of a council that worked as a conduit between hospital management and its employees. Nic also worked in NHS service transformation, delivering training and implementing improvement and innovation projects. 

After leaving the NHS before establishing his private therapy practice, he worked for a social justice charity leading mental health service improvement schemes designed to enhance the lives and autonomy of marginalised social groups. 

Nic has written articles for various publications including Royal College of Nursing’s ‘Mental Health Practice’ journal, and has edited many health promotion resources including a young peoples’ version of ‘Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia’ published by the British Psychological Society. He also developed a resource for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), which has been implemented within many CAMHS inpatient mental health hospitals throughout the UK. Professor Peter Fonagy OBE, chief executive of a mental health centre set up by Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, wrote the foreword for this publication.

For many years, Nic has been actively involved in communicating the message of non-duality. He publishes a new episode of the popular Nonduality Podcast each week. He is the founder of the first nondual therapy directory, a pool of counsellors, psychotherapists and inquiry facilitators influenced by the wisdom of nonduality.

Nic does not regard himself as a spiritual teacher or guru. 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’. Nic’s work is guided by over 15 years of immersion in the teaching of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, deepening into awakened realisation, and professional training in therapeutic modalities. 

Nic’s first book was ‘Living the Life That You Are: Finding Wholeness When You Feel Lost, Isolated, and Afraid’ which was published by Nonduality Press in 2018. ‘I Am Not the Body: Discovering the Truth Beyond Bondage’ was published in 2020, a best-selling book and audiobook of talks by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. 

His work is influenced by Nondual Therapy, Psychotherapy, Somatic Inquiry, Yoga Psychotherapy, Mindfulness-based Self-Inquiry, Psycho-spiritual counselling and Ayurvedic Psychology (Sattvavajaya Chikitsa). 

“Fundamentally, the root of suffering is our perceived separateness from life, which means that we experience life through the eyes of duality. Paradoxically, we also seek contentment in ourselves, to be at peace with a world that seems to be ‘out there.’ We try to achieve these aims while at the same time trying to heal the very separateness we’re striving to establish. Therefore, this underlying bewilderment and isolation fuel our society’s every pursuit: material, psychological, professional, social, and spiritual. Innocently, we’re looking in the wrong places; assuming love, peace, acceptance—or whatever we’re seeking to be complete—is out there; somewhere, something, or someone else. It’s our sense of disconnection that triggers this outward seeking. This agitated neediness only creates more division and suffering, bearing little fruit.

‘Non-duality’ doesn’t mean ‘against duality’; it’s not meant to imply that duality is bad. ‘Anti-duality’ denotes a dualistic state of mind from whence springs the fraught pursuit of certain expressions of life and the turning away from others. In other words, non-duality is both the deep knowing of inseparability and an entire embrace of passing paradox. It’s the supreme balancing of the contraries. It’s authentic connection. It’s Self-realization. It’s unconditional love.

When what is boundless becomes apparently restricted to a distinct form, the suffering—fearing and desiring or aversion and attraction—begins. Ego projects a broken world of otherness, aversion, and lack. The pure I-Amness shared by all gets veiled and we inadvertently seek a way back to wholeness. We are the whole universe but we think there’s something else outside us. Between us and our true home, time and space is imagined, confusingly creating a multitude of routes, maps, and guides.

When we know that we exist not merely as a human being but as oneness, there’s a possibility of discovering our true nature — our seamless unity with life which is full of creative infinite potential. In wholeness we lack nothing. Existence, being one, is you and yours; there is no one and nothing else. All the qualities of your true Self – love, connection, safety, belonging etc – are to be found here and now no matter how this moment seems.