About the Nondual Approach

By Tim Carrette From the void cometh all things, into the void do all things return. The quintessential Nondual Psychotherapy Gestalt Psychotherapy is the quintessential Nondualistic Psychotherapy. We are both lost and found in both suffering and emotional pain. We are form and formless. Self and not self. In the words of Martin Buber “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou.” Martin Buber was a Jewish theologian-mystic. He was one of many Spiritual influences on Gestalt Psychotherapy. His most famous work was “ I-Thou”,  a kind of poetic verse on Duality, Nonduality and the inherent relationship between all dualities. He called these two dualities I-It and I-Thou. I-It in Buber’s language is form, self, ego, character pattern. The always observable now of our situational senses, the phenomenology of our individual  beingness. I –Thou is the formless meeting and nondualistic interconnectedness of all things. The essence of our being, the …

  Rupert Spira: “This path is equally available for everybody, for all eight billion of us, irrespective of the condition of the mind... [If] you're a therapist with a nondual understanding and [someone was] suffering terribly... just listening to them would be something huge in their life... [Everything] you did with that person... would be an expression of non-duality. If that's where you are coming from, you would be teaching nonduality... everything you said would be informed by your deep understanding...  [The] real non-dual teaching is totally free from any formula and it tailors itself sensitively to the moment...”   

By Georgi Y. Johnson 

“As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.”

- Rumi

Therapy is about healing, which is the compassionate movement needed to return to naturalness and wholeness. Willow is not a mystical person, she’s rational, smart and practical. We’re sitting together at the university campus, discussing the science of pain. We’re reminding ourselves of the often mysterious and unreliable lack of correlation between the sensation of pain and physical disorder. Like all experience, pain is sublimely subjective. One person can have an injury in the knee and experience a life of ease. Another, with an identical injury, can be incapacitated by agony. Willow’s face changes and she seeks direct eye contact over her spectacles. She’s insecure but earnest: “At my father’s funeral, it hurt so much... It was physical pain. Literally, here in the body,” she said, banging her sternum and clawi…

What is nonduality? ‘Nonduality’ means ‘not two’, or ‘one without a second’. Although the word is often associated with the ancient Indian philosophy of Advaita, the understanding of fundamental oneness can be identified in mystical origins throughout all cultures. Nondual understanding denotes the deep knowing and direct insight into an essential awareness or consciousness that underlies and manifests the apparent play of separateness or duality. From the nondual perspective, the divide between individuals, objects, and all phenomena, is nothing but a conceptual construct. Nonduality reveals our true nature – the expressions of consciousness that everybody shares, including freedom, joy, peace and love. This knowledge, which isn’t intellectual knowledge, found in the insights of various sages through the ages, is the core of Hindu Vedanta, nearly all schools of Buddhism, and Taoism, and mystical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Nonduality does not negate the appearance…