Releasing From a Nondual Perspective
Our experience of true freedom lies in our capacity to fully welcome What Is. Overly emotional reactions caused by contractions - or stored overwhelming experience from the past - might arise in resistance to What Is, disrupting ease and flow. Offering these contractions into the spaciousness of Awareness where they have the room to unwind, brings an experience of greater freedom as the sense of being a separate, limited self melts away. This work is a large part of the process of integrating the nondual perspective.
We begin our session with a brief meditation, relaxing into our experience as it’s appearing now. We can then turn our attention toward being curious about what it is that knows what is appearing now. Sounds, sensations, thoughts, etc. are certainly known … but by what? It is here we come into a recognition of the open, spacious awareness that welcomes all appearances.
Other pointers are offered to help us rest as awareness, to recognize the peace in this, and then to notice what would arise to oppose that peace. What is coming up to be seen? What has been ignored or denied in the past, but is ready to be recognized and loved in the light of this awareness?
Nothing is rushed. All is welcomed.
Here, we investigate sensations and thoughts that have become entangled – stories and beliefs that accompany strong emotion – and, just for now, let each be free from the other. I then guide you in a decoupling of the story from the sensation, yet fully acknowledging and welcoming both. We also welcome any resistance to the welcoming!
The energetic tension or contraction that had been frozen in place by the story
is now free to move.
Resting as spacious Awareness without attention on the story gives you the opportunity to welcome the sensations, just as they are, and let them move as they will. All is intelligence, playing itself out. Your body is in a natural process of release. As a somatic empath, I may experience the release with you, enabling me to hold compassionate space and not rush the experience. Often, what is being let go of is long-held energetic patterning and conditioning that has been dictating behaviors or reactions to certain situations or, indeed, creating certain situations in your life for years.
To experience the release of an energetic holding is a liberating revelation of your True nature –
Peace and Freedom.
If it feels appropriate, the story can then be investigated without the burden of the sensation shouting that it is true. Most often, after release, the story seems irrelevant, as if it had been someone else’s experience or is a distant memory of a difficult time.
Once this process is experienced in one or more sessions, it becomes easier to lead yourself through this ‘letting go’ on your own, as life presents the opportunity. Indeed, the times of upset in our lives can come to be seen as a call and an opportunity to step back from the contracted narrow personal view, to rest as that spacious Awareness, and notice what happens when we let go. It becomes a very rewarding new habit to de-couple the story from the sensation and simply be with what truly is – the sensation — and welcome it fully.
This method of releasing was learned from Laura Lucille, who was an early student of Lester Levenson, a self-realized master and the father of the Sedona Method. I sat in her meetings and met with her privately for over five years.
There’s much that can be said about this simple but profoundly effective work. I welcome your questions.
Nondual Therapy
Peace, Freedom, Joy, Happiness, Love, Understanding, Curiosity, Beauty, Innocence, Care …
Another element that may come into a releasing session is that of Nondual Therapy which recognizes the transformative power of the fundamental, or nondual qualities of Consciousness in a theraputic setting. It holds that within each energetic contraction held in the body there is actually a nondual quality, frozen in time, such as innocence, freedom, purity, joy, etc. and in fact, was contracted against at the time of trauma - with the trauma having been associated with it. The nondual therapist learns to recognize the dualistic qualities that tend to manifest in the place of the more natural, but now inaccessible, fundamental quality. For instance, in place of innocence, guilt might be project inward, or accusation projected outward. In this case, the truer quality of innocence is called into the field (or recognized as being present in natural response the the presence of guilt or accusation) while the therapist holds the container and perhaps silently, or more overtly, encourages a perspective of innocence, allowing the contraction to release.
I am integrating this practice more and more into my work with others in a transparent way, but at times it is helpful to name qualities that are coming forward into the container. I have studied with Georgi Y. Johnson who authored “Nondual Therapy - The Psychology of Awakening,” and received a first certification in Nondual Therapy. Her book is a fascinating read and contains a compendium with write-ups on 35 qualities and their dualistic counterparts. I see this work as at the cutting edge of therapy in that it can be integrated in with other models, but especially in its recognition that as we integrate the nondual perspective, we can all become conscious channels of these qualities that are always and ever present for us to experience and to offer in service to others.