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 or some other suffering 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. Some people have needed to suppress or numb painful things because they haven’t been able to deal with them.
One thing prevents healthy change and growth: 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.
We are so accustomed to perceiving a dualistic paradigm; there’s “me” and a world of “other” existing in an infinite and vastly unknown universe of disparate objects. We’ve all inherited the belief that everything beyond our skin is not us or our’s, that we’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.
We’ve become apparently disconnected from our essential nondual Awareness which is universal. It’s as if something in us knows we are not merely islands, but part of the universal mainland we struggle to find: a microcosm of a much greater macrocosm.
Therapy is about healing, and true healing is about rediscovering nonduality – our natural wholeness – after all, suffering is based on the misperception of separateness.
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 and nondogmatic. “Nonduality” doesn’t mean “against duality”; it’s not meant to imply that duality is bad. Instead, nonduality is both rootedness in foundational inseparability and an entire embrace of passing paradox. It’s the supreme balancing of the opposites.
In nondual therapy, clients become more conscious of their suffering (which is based on the perception of duality) and meet it as it shows up, so it can be integrated and its charge lessened, and to 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).
As you will learn in this workshop, 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.
In this nondual therapy training workshop, you will help your clients find the capacity to attend to thoughts, feelings and sensations, and utilise special therapeutic, somatic and spiritual tools and practise to release pain, trauma and suffering. Help your clients 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. Help them discover a clearing for their suffering and recognise that it was never actually “theirs”. Beliefs are seen with new clarity and denied or hidden feelings are met with compassionate openness.
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.
This nondual therapy training workshop will be facilitated by Nic Higham (bio found on website menu)