Nonduality and Nondual Therapy

The experience of a separate self is simply that, an experience. In the same way that going for a walk, riding on a rollercoaster, or feeling the wind and rain on the skin is an experience, so is the experience of being an individual limited to a specific  personality in a specific body, bound by a life story (set of beliefs and assumptions about reality). The separate self is an experience created by the thinking mind and YOU - awareness/consciousness, becomes apparently attached to this creation and lives life from it.  We have the experience of losing the sense of our Beingness (and all of our innate qualities and resources) and so spend our lives suffering as we experience a sense of lack and search for our True Self - which is always here, now, in this moment as what we are. YOU are the one experiencing the sense of being a person.  You are the one that knows the experience. You are NOT the experience, and you are never hurt by any experience (thought, feeling, sensation, perception)  that you know.  You simply are. Here. Now. This present moment. 

When we do experience pain in response to significant life events there is a subtle or not so subtle message given to us around negation of experience, where we are guided through an apparent process as a means of moving this experience from our field of awareness. The way that we are often met when we seek support has the energy of this point of view.  This point of view is bound in the illusion of separation where we develop preferences for certain experiences (i.e.happiness, good health, birth) , and aversions to other (sadness, pain and grief, death), and develop associated strategies to try to get what we want from the present moment - and so missing the beauty in all experience that is this one life that we are. Our liberation from the illusion of the separate self is thus not about trying to get rid of any experience that is here now, but rather taking a curious and courageous seeing of it (surrender) whilst simultaneously unravelling the beliefs and assumptions about our experience that have been created over time.  

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Because the thinking mind is simply that, thinking, it does not know Beingness (True Nature) but it is made of it. Our suffering occurs as a result of the mind trying to find the qualities of True Nature (Beingness) through grasping (desire) and aversion (fear) as distortions in patterns of thinking and behaviour. These are known as contractions of qualities of True Nature. For example, in seeking the connection that is always present, the mind grasps for intimacy and fears loneliness. In seeking Belonging the mind grasps for acceptance and avoids rejection. Only when we are supported to rest here and now and experience the felt sense of this suffering in the body can we experience the very quality that these distorted thought patterns are seeking.  We recognise the sense of Belonging and Connection that is always here, as the one being that we are, and recognise ourselves beyond the illusion of separation. This is true healing, as we allow the experience of the separate self to come back into flow with our True Nature.