Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 15
August 31, 2017
Love
[image error]Love is the power out of which consciousness is born. It arises spontaneously out of the space between and within all forms to reunite through form, in full transformational unfolding. Love pulls towards harmony and expands from within each contraction.
This love is not mine, nor yours: it precedes both you and I. It can’t be possessed, won or lost, as it outlives us all. Know love through its effects, opening the heart, clearing the soul of obstruction, loving even obstructions into reunion with all that is.
Affirmation:
Here, I am always, already in Love
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Rumi
August 27, 2017
The Dark Night of the Soul and Nondual Awakening
Between the inherited and conditioned structures of personality and the qualities of our essential Being, there is a rift of emptiness. The rift in form sometimes referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul, or the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is a region of pure emptiness, alive with all omnipresent resources. In the words of Joseph Campbell, “The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.”
However, it is also the dimension of the most denied aspects of our psyche. It harbours the overdraft of our illusion of negation. When we throw stuff, memories, situations or emotions “away”, this is the “away” we are throwing them into. Jung has described this space as the unconscious (prior to the experience of Opus Mundi or One World), where the shadows of the psyche lurk, seeking energetic reunion with the whole through their reintegration into conscious awareness. It is the dimension of trauma (separated parts of ourselves) that demands integration. It is the rift in which we can meet our own worst nightmares – and liberate them into freedom. Yet there can be tremendous resistance to going beneath the layer of personality. “People will do anything,” writes Carl Jung, “no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
Because of the threats anticipated in the ‘Dark Night”, rings of existential states shield us off from this realm. These core states are also inherited and tend to be carried collectively in the atmospheres of a family, home or nation. These states include states of boredom – that drive us away from direct experience to seek egoic distraction in the ‘outer’ world; states of “nothing” – not an empty nothing, but a thick, resistant, nothing of energetic denial; states of depression (which can become chronic, as pressure to integrate the whole increases) and states of negativity (life is poison). Many beliefs giving form to the personality are crafted by these states that shield us from the experience of a deeper falling into the expected and dreaded horrors of the unknown (unconscious) regions of the Dark Night. When the states fail, or are threatened, anxiety or panic can come forward.
[image error]The Dark Night is where we fall with our consciousness when personality (or part of personality) breaks down. It is rarely absolute in its hold on our experience, but it can become a regular experiential encounter, bringing still more dread to daily living. It is like an ocean under an infinite sky. But rather than the beauty of the night sky, with its stars, moon and glorious subtle effects, we are surrounded by a dense mist. The mist will be characterized by a most denied part of an energetic contraction, such as betrayal, abandonment, grief, negativity or abuse. These atmospheres become the sky of experience and we breath them in and out as if they were the fundamental quality of consciousness itself. The denied parts of experience become like gods in this foggy wilderness, and the suffering can seem uncontainable.
Part of the experience of the Dark Night is literally like bleeding out. Just as if we were to lose a limb of the body and have an open wound, the pain of broken personhood flows through and out of us as if endlessly. Physical posture and gate will often reflect this energetic phenomenon of bleeding to death. Yet the bleeding at a certain stage, when allowed, will stop, possibly leaving a stillness and calm that is beyond the conditions formally laid down by the stress structures of personality. Compassion, mercy and grace are all needed through this period of intense suffering, as well as the assurance that it will pass. Attempts to get rid of the pain simply delay it to later, and in this, a deep responsibility can be with the therapist to escort the pain rather than encouraging denial or distraction from it. We need to support our client in “Enduring the unendurable,” as spiritual psychologist Bart ten Berge says. The part of frozen personality that has died needed to die. We would do well to honour and perhaps even grieve its passing.
As Ram Dass writes: “The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.”
Navigation through the dark night can be tremendously supported by attitudes that represent beacons of light: including gratitude, humility, service and compassion. It can be noticed that all these attitudes help infiltrate through the energetic substance of division that encases the belief in a separate self. Gratitude spreads a feeling of loving acknowledgment outwards, beyond the individual. Humility surrenders whatever the individual might suppose itself to be towards a greater whole. Service offers the individual form to work for the greater whole. Compassion acknowledges the co-dependence of all individuals within the greater whole, and that suffering is not an exclusive, private business. These spiritual ethics, adopted in sincerity, help light the way between the inner core of freedom and the suffering atmospheres of personality and vice versa in periods of existential despair and angst. They invite resources from the universal, benevolent emptiness which suffuses the dimension of the Dark Night experience. These key qualities open our receptivity towards the unlimited qualities of our true nature. In the words of John of the Cross: “In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.”
A prevalent characteristic of the Dark Night is the denial of the Nondual Quality of Helplessness. We are born helpless, we die helpless, and in the space between, a core helplessness thinly disguised by the illusion of control underlies all experience. Denial of our inherent helplessness isolates us from all universal resources and the support of others. It freezes our receptivity, meaning that it is painful to receive love, support, care and nurture. Without helplessness, we are unable to call for help, and the without that resonant call, our wider universe is unable to respond. Allowance of our inherent helplessness means we begin to unfold the contracted state, revealing the chorus of need in its precise configuration to the infinite resource of all we are. Whether through prayer or reaching out to our fellow human, the admission of helplessness is the initiator of decompression that will clear the universal skies of the smog that has been obscuring the stars. Again, the moment we admit our inherent helplessness, we are already asking energetically for help. The tired, old barrier of the separate self is crumbling.
In the words of Nondual Therapist John Welwood: “Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us -by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth.”
The above article is extracted from Stillness of the Wind – a Manifesto for Nondual Therapy by Georgi Y. Johnson.
Click here for more articles on Nondual Therapy on the I AM HERE website.
“Being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol’ dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes!”
Friedrich Nietzsche
August 23, 2017
Healing Through the Generations – Juneau, Alaska
Juneau, Alaska, USA
4-10 September, 2017
Facilitator: Bart Ten Berge.
In this class we will work with:
1. Understanding epigenetics and the physical resonance of thoughts and feelings.
2. Identifying unresolved inherited trauma.
3. Opening the heart to allow space for our oldest fears
4. Embodiment: gaining insight into contractions held in the body and how this circulated through emotional and mental patterns.
5. Reunion with atmospheres around family attitudes and moving beyond them.
6. Allowing the blessing of resilience to support our peers and future generations.
Space is limited and you are invited. 
August 22, 2017
The Greatest Lie – Nonduality & the Myth of Negation
“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.”
Lao Tzu
When I was nine years old, my mother remarried and we moved from England to live in Belgium. My parents had married young and their relationship had split apart almost from the outset under the pressure of conflicting drives towards wholeness. They were both from working class backgrounds and both breaking the forms of their upbringing: my father, by getting a degree and climbing rapidly through the vanguards of international marketing; my mother, by being one of only a few to leave the small town in Lincolnshire to look for a better life, a movement she felt was viewed by the local community as a kind of treachery. After the divorce, the reality of my mother pervaded my perspective, and we only sporadically saw my father back in England.
[image error]The last time I saw him, the monotheism of the legends of the home in Belgium exploded and the world of my psyche was torn in two. I saw two truths, two stories, two points of view, two separated and blindly incompatible forms of suffering. His tears didn’t taste like my mother’s, but I knew their flavour. The grief-swept longing of his heart had a different rhythm from hers. Yet I helplessly knew them both from inside and out. The outer world of mother and father were felt as the inner world of two universes of truth, with no dictionary between them and no way to bring them together. It was like England and Belgium; Catholicism and Vedanta; East and West. It felt as if right hand and left hand were irrevocably divided; and the rupture in these world views felt like all view was lost, leaving only an unfathomable absence. Between the mother and father, I began falling through the frail floor of teenage truths and into a vast, despairing silence where beliefs lose all conviction.
My father had become frail, burning from the inside-out and into the flesh. Alcoholism and the existential despair behind his insatiable ambition was cracking the form of all he had pretended to be. Sleepless, starved and saturated with alcohol, he reached out to me to save him, but refused to let me say a word.
Helpless, mute and stunned, I returned to Belgium. What followed was an inner lock-down, in which I froze, outwardly and inwardly, in an impenetrable tiredness and an indefinable horror of depression, disappointment and fruitless expectation. The world turned awkward and nothing made sense. The senses themselves were closing.
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Within six months, we received a phone call saying he had died. A common cold had become flu and flu had become pneumonia. In hospital, he contracted septicaemia and with no resistance left in the 39-year-old body, he was gone. On the day that call came, he was supposed to visit us. My first, involuntary reaction was tremendous relief. I still don’t know if that relief was mine or his.
There followed a long period in which I would isolate myself and dive through the core of mortal shock. Death had arrived and it was experienced as a spiralling of impossibility. Grieving the loss through archetypal layers of crucifixion, I turned my back on the outer world and began spiralling through endless expanses of pure absence. By degrees, communication and connection broke down with the manifest world as I searched into that all-powerful end-point called death. It was a despairing process of inner shocks of awakening to mortality, not only my father’s, but the mortality of everything.
The end-game came when I began thinking about suicide. Perhaps dissociated, because it felt like a private little drama, and with some inner grandiosity, I went to the kitchen and took the super-sharp kitchen knife. Back in the room, I rested the surface of the blade on my wrist. I can still feel the sharp pressure of the blade on the skin.
With thoughts still chasing mortality, I looked over the brink of death, to be sure that this would be the end. Suddenly, there was a powerful re-awakening of myself as life, as existence itself.
With unconquerable clarity, it was realized that all that exists cannot become non-existent; that ‘A’ could never become ‘not A’. Whatever ‘is’ cannot cease to be. Negation is an impossibility. Suicide would bring me nowhere other than where I am. With horror, I put the knife down and broke down in a gutted, throbbing grief. The grief was not that I could die, but that I couldn’t. It wasn’t about death, but about the lack of it. There was no way out.
Negation is an illusion, and as an illusion, it builds more illusion.
The puncturing of this most fundamental illusion – the illusion of negation – would be formational to the unfolding of the psyche in this lifetime. The realization was that, despite the vast freedom of existential being which is here, we cannot undo what is; we can shape, mould, transform, delay, speed up and destroy, but we can’t undo creation.
We can’t remove what is; we can’t cancel out anyone or anything or any happening. We can close our eyes, but we can’t delete what we have seen. We can’t un-experience ourselves. Negation is an illusion, and as an illusion, it builds more illusion.
This opened a core of responsibility. I knew nothing about how to move forward, to find form, to grow, or how to be here. But I knew that this ‘being here’ cannot be undone by death. We can create, destroy, form and transform, but there is no option to cease to exist.
The upcoming book Stillness of the Wind is based on that fundamental insight – that we are not able to negate anything that we are. We can however, allow transformation and more specifically, the transformation of beliefs, reflexes, and energetic patterns based on a freezing of who we thought we are, and what we thought we are.
We are living beings, and being itself is in perpetual motion: it’s not a stable object. This being is radically free, spiralling through and around core existential qualities: the qualities of our true nature.
These qualities can never be won or lost. They can’t be possessed, controlled or held. They can’t be increased, decreased or deceased. As part of all we are, they can never be negated.
Yet, based on the belief in negation, we have radically misconceived our true nature. We believe that love can be forced, controlled and lost. We believe that peace is something we need to work for. We believe that freedom is only possible where there are no boundaries. We believe that honour is something that needs winning.
We believe that the unconditional depends on the conditions – conditions that could never occur without the unconditional space in which they emerge. It’s a fundamental fallacy.
These consensual and energetic forms of belief create enormous suffering. Where there has been disconnection, we move into traumatic zones where the feeling connection with the qualities is forgotten. For example, when our innocence is lost, it means it can never come back: it is dead forever. When our purity is defiled, it is an eternal defilation. We espouse beliefs that perpetuate our own condemnation – actively creating isolated pockets of hell within the psyche, where no light is permitted to shine.
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Images on this post: 幸せの色19
Out of this great disenfranchisement from our existential core, we try to recreate the qualities of our true nature through pretence. But the image of the quality can always be shattered: it is perpetually under threat. When we wear the quality on the outside, it can be easily ripped away to expose the existential horror lurking behind.
So, we try to possess the pretence of the quality still more, tightening our grasp. We decide that for ‘me’ to be innocent, others must be guilty; for ‘me’ to belong, others must be rejected. By degrees, we have given emotional and sentient substance to an absurd idea – that the individual is eternally separated from the whole both outside and inside himself, and that we are individually divided from each other, from the planet and from the source of life.
As individual, separate selves. we must survive, and this doomed survival project demands us to remain in perpetual conflict with the whole. In this, the qualities of our true nature become demonized. They threaten us as abstract icons of our own unworthiness. The potent purity of a new born baby can cause us to recoil in repulsion. The unbounded love of an animal can provoke violence. These qualities shine on and they rattle and shake the areas where they are frozen. The essential qualities of being shine their holiness on our own defilement and this can make us feel worse still. Qualities can be feared as death traps rather than welcomed as sign-posts to an inner space where death has no meaning. Just as we grasp towards the end of suffering, the conditioning behind suffering tightens its grasp on us.
Can we imagine a peace which is always here, regardless of the condition of heart or mind, regardless of our nations and conflicting cultures?
How would it be if there were a sense of belonging, at the core of any one we could ever be, that can never be taken away, and which can always be accessed through an open, inner door?
How would it be if the love we feel for another was experienced as a love that is never possessed, that moves through us and through all forms and which can never be lost?
Can we imagine a peace which is always here, regardless of the condition of heart or mind, regardless of our nations and conflicting cultures? A peace that underlies all winning and losing; all competition and collaboration; all birth and death; and all thought?
Is it even rational to believe that peace depends on the end of war in order to exist? Or that love depends on the absence of hatred? Or that freedom is enslaved to the negation of form in order to be felt?
Such layers of illusion and misconception, with dreadful consequences, are facilitated by our fundamental belief in negation: that we can cease to be. Out of this belief in the choice between being and non-being, existence and non-existence, presence and absence, we go to war with ourselves. Life declares war on life, and declares that it’s an end-game. Consciousness conflicts with consciousness; and experience competes with experience. We split the psyche into pieces and suffer what feels like endless repetition of affliction, when all that is needed is to begin to open some well-known inner doors and to walk a remembrance into who we truly are.
The True Nature of Time, Bart & Georgi: Oct. 6-8th, 2017, Netherlands
Friday October 6th – Sunday October 8th, 2017
ISSP, Biotoop, Kerklaan 30, Haren, Netherlands
Facilitators: Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson
Form does not differ from the Now
And the Now does not differ from Form.
Form is the Now and the Now is Form.
A 3-day gathering to liberate the wonder of time, working with the fundamental nondual quality of the Now.
Includes:
Opening freedom to move through time-lines
Liberation of contractions of memory and imagination
Experience as Vortex
Titration and Pendulation through time anchors
Consolidation in the felt-sense of eternity
To find out more: info@iamhere.life
Tijd : Van 10.00- tot 18.00 uur.
Plaats : Kerklaan 30 te Haren (Gn)
Prijs : € 350,-
Betaling : Van tevoren op rekeningnr. NL49ABNA042.90.42.221.
Inschrijving : Via e-mail adres: info@iamhere.life
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Where past and future dissolve, the Now is happening.
Teaching Agenda in Israel 2017
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The Art of Happiness
Wednesday 30th August, Meditation Evening.
Facilitators: Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y, Johnson
Herzl 26, Zichron Yaakov
7-10 pm
Cost: 100 NIS
Space is limited!
To ensure your space, register through SMS: 0524297196
[image error]The Strength of Unknowing
Saturday 16th September, Meditation Day.
Facilitators: Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y, Johnson
Herzl 26, Zichron Yaakov
9-5 pm
Cost: 250 NIS
Space is limited!
To ensure your space, register through SMS: 0524297196
[image error]All About Freedom
Saturday 21st October, Meditation Day.
Facilitators: Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y, Johnson
Herzl 26, Zichron Yaakov
9-5 pm
Cost: 250 NIS
Space is limited!
To ensure your space, register through SMS: 0524297196
[image error]Spiritual Psychology Education: Phase 1, Module 1
Thursday 7th – Monday 11th December
Herzl 26, Zichron Yaakov
9-5 pm
Cost: 2350 NIS
This is the first module of the first phase of the Spiritual Psychology Education. The workshop opens conscious awareness to the energy body and offers techniques for self inquiry, increasing and balancing vitality and for working with others through spiritual healing and nondual therapy. The education is certified at the completion of each phase by the International School of Spiritual Psychology (ISSP).
The two year program in Israel is in English and is facilitated by Bart ten Berge and Georgi Y. Johnson.
Space is limited!
To ensure your space, register through SMS: 0524297196
[image error]Spiritual Psychology Education: Phase 3, Module 3 (HP XIII)
Thursday 21st – Monday 25th December
Herzl 26, Zichron Yaakov
9-5 pm
Cost: 2350 NIS
This workshop is open only to ongoing ISSP students who have completed phase 1 and phase 2 of the Spiritual Psychology education.
[image error]The True Nature of Time
Thursday 4th – Saturday 6th January, 2018
Herzl 26, Zichron Yaakov
9-5 pm
Cost: 1350 NIS
Graduate course, including steps towards experiential realization of the nature of time – and the eternity in the moment. Includes therapeutic techniques working with:
Titration & Pendulation
Vortex of experience
Time line travelling (the past and future in the Now)
Liberation of Memory and Imagination
Course Facilitators: Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y, Johnson
To ensure your space, register through SMS: 0524297196
August 20, 2017
The Living Horror of the Lynch: Epigenetics of Trauma
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Abel Meeropol (1939)
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May 1911 – the lynching of Laura Nelson.
As in horror we watch the digital broadcast of beheadings conducted by ISIS, perhaps refusing to enter this raw confrontation with the blood of death, defeat and barbarity, we often hear that this is a throwback from the Middle Ages. Perhaps the easiness in believing that belies a deeper trauma, hidden in the dark night of our collective unconscious. To many African Americans, the word “lynch” is far from historic. To millions of free humans living under oppressive regimes across the world, it even remains a perpetual threat. Sexual transgression, the accusation of intention to commit a terrorist act (by carrying a pocket knife), racial difference, jealousy and poverty, all feed the atmosphere of the lynch. This is a dimension of material and spiritual poverty through which the most bloody and crowd-endorsed expressions of hatred and cruelty take form. The collective murder expressed through lynchings takes the form of racial discrimination, and America’s over 5000 lynch victims have included civil rights activists, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians and others as well as the vast majority of African Americans murdered for a perceived offence to white privilege.
It’s not a private fear – the fear to be lynched. It has within it the contractions of ultimate rejection, disenfranchisement, power abuse and social condemnation. Often, our worst nightmare is not to be the victim but to be identified with the perpetration. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, anyone who witnesses or takes part in a lynch is going to carry the open wound of the trauma:
All thoughtful men…must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims – on which occasions the mob seems to lay more weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal…There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation…Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.
Scientists have now been able to trace the epigenetic tags – stressors affecting the DNA and signalling fight, freeze and flight responses to the body – within African American populations living today, tracing the population movements into North America, and out of the Southern states of the USA (as a result of lynching, intimidation and segregation laws). This is the science of epigenetics – the more refined layer above the DNA, that masterminds gene activation and gene suppression. Today coined “Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome”, the psycho-cultural inquiry into the damage done to all sides is finally emerging, endorsed by the evidence of genetic science. (See: Tales of African-American History Found in DNA, New York Times, May 27th, 2016)
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A 21C campaign of terror: postcards displaying lynch victims and spreading the fear and threat of white supremacy.
The science of epigenetics is revealing how the external environment affects us at the molecular level by altering gene expression and function that can, in turn, be inherited. It refers to chemical modifications or “tags” that mark specific genes around the intricate DNA complex.
From a psychological and healing perspective, the evolution of science and more sophisticated tools of inquiry into the nano-dimensions are literally showing us how our personality (that which makes us fearful, bad, good, guilty, a winner or a loser) is resonantly encoded in the form of stress responses around our DNA, and was received by us from our parents together with the cells of our bodies. This coding is formed by trauma and contracted states, or areas of stress and suffering. Healing is possible, when we are able to find peace with what was inherited, and create the inner safety for the genes to return to expression more directly attuned to the real-time environment.
The aim of the lynch – beyond the stolen rush of the immediate blood-fest of cruelty, lawlessness and the temporary proof that ‘might is right’ – is to spread terror through the grasping of God-like authority over dignity, life and death. An effect of this is learned helplessness, cooperation with systems of disenfranchisement and structures of subordination based on the basic, physical instinct to survive.
Moving with the power of raw emotion outside the structures of law, the vigilanti literally aims to extinguish the forms he or she fears, as embodied in the lynch victim. In the Southern States, this propagation of terror went viral in the form of postcards of lynch victims. According to TIME Magazine: “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned the cards from the mails.” To any African American (and non African Americans), even such an image of racial crucifixion could be enough to awaken the terror embedded in the raw extinct to survive. Now, science has shown that those genetic alarm bells pass through the body from parent to child. Of course, when the world is unsafe for some, the world becomes unsafe for all: every perpetrator also embodies the terror that next time, he or she could be on the other side of the rope.
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April Shipp’s quilt remembers US lynching victims
When Mark Wolynn wrote the book It Didn’t Start With You, he didn’t feel he yet had the authority of direct experience to write about the tremendous collective and individual trauma of slavery and the ongoing abuse of power within the racial divide within the USA. Then he met April, who’s healing journey unveiled one of the most brutal and unspoken chapters of America’s history.
The following is a special extract of April’s story, which is one of the second edition additions to Mark’s book: It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who You Are and How to End the Cycle.
April, an African American quilt maker, was in her early forties when she saw a photo taken in 1911 of a black woman and her son hanging by their necks from a bridge. Several white men, women, and children lined the causeway above them. In that moment, April’s life changed. She became overwhelmed with the thought and image of lynching. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “That could have been me and my son.” From the day she saw that photograph, April’s anxiety increased. “It was as though every tree I saw had a body hanging from it.”
I asked her if she knew of anyone in her family who had been lynched.
It was difficult to say. In the late 1800s, her grandfather, the child of a black man and white woman, was left, along with his sister, on the side of the road. Her family took in the grandfather, but not his sister. It’s unknown what happened to the grandfather’s sister or his father.
As we know from history, black men were often punished for having sexual relationships with white women. Yet, white slave owners routinely fathered children with the women they held captive. A study published in May 2016 found genetic evidence of this history buried in the DNA of African Americans alive today. The DNA bore traces of European descent, which could be time-stamped during the era of slavery, thus enabling researchers to validate what has long been common knowledge.
Although April couldn’t pinpoint with certainty that her grandfather’s father or sister, or anyone else in her family, had been hanged, she suspected someone had. At the very least, she carried the residues of a collective trauma, and shared it with other African Americans who felt similar fear.
April felt compelled to research every documented case of African American men, women, and children who had been lynched in America from 1865 to 1965. She uncovered the names of more than 5,000 people and sewed each one with gold silk thread onto a black quilt. With each name she added, April had a sense that another soul could finally rest. After three years, the length of time it took to finish the quilt, which now weighed twelve pounds, April finally felt free.
In Nondual Therapy, we emphasize that often the complete release of trauma involves awakening to the most unspoken feelings within the shared atmosphere of the event. In our determination to support – and identify with – the victim within ourselves, this often leaves the perpetrator unprocessed. The horrific, socially affirmed phenomena of lynching has impact on us all, as the trauma of rejection and condemnation takes on hellish proportions with an outcome of death. No-one, whether victim or perpetrator is genetically left untouched by being in this field, and we are all also in it. We needn’t warn that history repeats, as history is repeating as this is written, even within our collective dread of that repetition. It is an individual and collective responsibility to find and open an inner power that is deeper and unconditioned by the dynamics of victim and perpetrator. Out of this power, a deeper evolution that arises out of the freedom beneath all human differentiation can be liberated.
For online mentoring with Georgi to release the suffering of PTSD through Nondual Therapy, Find out more here.
July 26, 2017
Walking With Peace & Presence – Thich Nhat Hanh
by Thich Nhat Hanh
Peace is something we can contemplate every day. Walking meditation is one of the ways to contemplate peace, and today we are going to walk together, generating the energy of peace, solidity, and freedom. I suggest that when you breathe in, you make three steps. Bring your attention to the soles of your feet, and become aware of the contact between your foot and the ground. Bring your attention down from the level of the brain to the soles of your feet. Breathing in, we make three steps, and we may tell ourselves with each step, “I have arrived. I have arrived. I have arrived.” And breathing out, we make another three steps, always mindful of the contact between our feet and the ground, and we say, “I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.”
Arrived where? Where is our home? According to the teaching and the practice of the Buddha, life is available only in the present moment, in the here and the now. And when you go back to the present moment, you have a chance to touch life, to encounter life, to become fully alive and fully present. That is why every step brings us back to the present moment, so that we can touch the wonders of life that are available. Therefore, when I say, “I have arrived,” I mean I have arrived in the here and the now — the only place, the only time where and when life is available, and that is my true home.
The Buddha said that the past is already gone, and the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for us to live, and that is the present moment. We have an appointment with life, and that appointment takes place in the present moment. If we miss the present moment, we miss our appointment with life, which is serious. In our daily life, we have a tendency to think about the past, to get caught in the sorrow and regret concerning the past, and to get caught in the fear and uncertainty about the future, so our mind is not in the present moment. That is why it is very important to learn how to go back to the present moment in order to become fully alive, fully present. Walking meditation helps us do that easily.
When I begin, I make two or three steps and I practice arriving. “I have arrived. I am home.” It means, I don’t want to run anymore, because I know that conditions for my happiness are already here in the present moment. Sometimes we believe that happiness is not possible in the here and the now; we need a few more conditions to be happy. So we run towards the future to get the conditions we think are missing. But by doing so we sacrifice the present moment, we sacrifice true life. Therefore, learning how to go home to the present moment is the basic practice of mindfulness. “I have arrived. I am home.” My home is right here, right now. I don’t want to run anymore. The habit of running may have been transmitted to me by my parents, and I may have been running all my life. Now I don’t want to run anymore, I want to stop. Walking meditation helps us learn to stop in order to be truly alive, truly present. “I have arrived. I am home.”
If you walk like that with every step, the energy of mindfulness and concentration will be there to support you. And the place where you walk becomes the pure land of the Buddha or the kingdom of God. The blue sky, the beautiful vegetation, the face of a child, the flower blooming — all these wonders belong to the kingdom of God, to the pure land of the Buddha. We allow separation between us and those wonders of life because we allow anger, fear, grieving, and despair to stand in our way. Going home to our body by mindful breathing will help us let go of our worries, our regret and our fear, and that is the basic condition for us to get in touch with the wonders of life that are truly present in the here and the now.
We should walk in such a way that the pure land of the Buddha, the kingdom of God becomes a reality in the here and the now. There is not one day when I do not enjoy walking in the kingdom of God, in the pure land of the Buddha. Why should I deprive myself of that pleasure? I need only some energy of mindfulness, of concentration, in order to penetrate into the kingdom of God, into the pure land of the Buddha.
The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and the now. But the question is whether you are available to the kingdom. Our practice is to make ourselves ready for the kingdom so that it can manifest in the here and the now. You don’t need to die in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, you have to be truly alive in order to do so. It’s not too difficult. Just breathe in and bring your mind back to your body. That is the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness of breathing can be combined with mindfulness of walking, and you will continue to get the nourishment and healing that is available in the here and the now. Let us walk in such a way that every step can bring us stability, freedom, healing, and transformation. In order for each step to be solid, to be free, to be healing, to be nourishing, we need the energy of mindfulness and concentration. That energy can be obtained by mindful breathing, mindful stepping. “I have arrived. I am home.” That is not a statement. That is a practice, and you will know whether you have arrived or not in the here and the now. You don’t need another person to tell you. If you are truly established in the here and the now, you feel free, and you can get in touch with all the wonders of life that are available to you. Every step is an enjoyment.
Peace is the outcome of that practice. Walk in such a way that peace becomes a reality in every cell of your body, in every cell of your consciousness, because our consciousness is also made of cells. Mental formations, feelings, perception – they’re all the cells of our consciousness. And when we breathe peacefully, the peace of our breath will penetrate into our body and into our mind. Then very soon, in no time at all, body, mind, and breath will become one in concentration, and we get the energy of stability, solidity, and freedom generated by every step we make. “I have arrived. I am home.” That is a practice.
After a few minutes, you may move to the second line of the poem: “In the here. In the now.” It means I have arrived in the here and the now. I am at home in the here and the now. The address of the pure land, the address of the kingdom of God, the address of peace and brotherhood is here and now. If you want to meet the Buddha, if you want to touch God, if you want to touch the ultimate dimension, that is the address: the here and the now. It is very special.
After some time, you might like to move to the third line. “I am solid. I am free.” Solidity and freedom are the most important characteristics of happiness. Without some solidity, without some freedom, true happiness is not possible; therefore, every step should be able to generate more of the energy of solidity and freedom. And, again, this is not a wish or a declaration. If you are able to make steps, they can bring you back to the here and the now. You become more solid and freer with every step. So, “I am solid, I am free” means I notice that now I am more solid, I am freer. That makes the practice much more pleasant, because every step helps to bring more solidity and freedom to you. You walk like a prince. You walk like a lion, a princess. You walk like a king, because you are truly yourself, with all your serenity. “I am solid. I am free.”
Every step becomes a delight. Every step has the power to heal, to transform. Not only can we heal ourselves by our steps, but we can help heal the Earth and the environment.
The last line of the poem is, “In the ultimate I dwell.” There are two dimensions to reality. The first dimension is called the historical dimension, and the second dimension is the ultimate dimension. We have an ultimate dimension–the ground of our being–and if we know how to live deeply every moment of our historical dimension, we are able to touch our ultimate dimension.
It is like a wave. A wave may seem to have a beginning and end. A wave might be seen as high or low, big or small, different or not different from other waves. These terms–beginning, ending, high, low, more or less beautiful–they belong to the dimension called historical, but the wave is at the same time the water. Water transcends the form of the wave, the idea of beginning, ending, high, or low. These notions apply to the wave but not to the water. The moment when the wave realizes that she is water, she loses all her fear and she enjoys much more being a wave. She is free from birth and death, being and non-being, high or low, because when we are able to touch our ultimate dimension, we are no longer subjected to fear– fear of being; fear of non-being; fear of birth; fear of death.
This is a very, very deep practice. When you’ve touched your true foundation, your true nature, the nature of no birth and no death, then non-fear arises. And with non-fear, true happiness will become possible. It is possible to live each moment of our daily life in such a way that helps us to touch our ultimate dimension. And this is a wonderful way to transcend fear.
“I have arrived. I am home. In the here. In the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.” Four lines guiding us in our practice of walking meditation. Let us practice together as a Sangha, as a community. Let us flow like a river, generating peace with every step we make. There is no walk for peace; peace is the walk. By walking, we generate peace within our body, our consciousness. We embrace and heal the pain, the sorrow, the fear in us, and that is the ground for helping peace to be a reality in the world. Let us sing these lines together in order to help memorize the four lines of the song: “I have arrived. I am home. In the here and in the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.”
Let us walk together and let us generate the energy of peace and happiness and joy. Let us transform this place and this time into the kingdom of God, into the pure land of the Buddha. This is possible. The collective energy of mindfulness will be generated and penetrate into every one of us for our transformation and healing. Happy walking for everyone.
Copyright 2002 Thich Nhat Hanh
July 24, 2017
The Living Resource of the Nondual Child
[This is an extract from Stillness of the Wind: a Guide to Nondual Healing, an upcoming book offering modalities for nondual therapy by Georgi Y. Johnson. The book introduces and explains the notion of physical, emotional and mental contraction based on energetic splits into dualities and offers nondual qualities that having a healing power in unfolding contractions and trauma back into the flow of the living psyche in naturalness. Stillness of the Wind will be published in January 2018. Sign up to the I AM HERE Newsletter to stay updated.]
MOTHER, FATHER & CHILD
The partner of mother is father.
The child has no opposite.
In the child, father and mother are one.
Regardless of sexual orientation, all of us are children to a mother and father. In this, the child is the nondual position of mother and father. In broad terms, we will even see in expressionist brushstrokes the duality that attracted mother and father together expressed as a nondual elixir in the child. For example: a mother who is expressing a lot of shame can be paired with a father who expresses disgust. The child born to them could have a strong quality of purity – that inherent quality to which both shame and disgust seek reconnection. This rough formula is both brings insight to the formational years of the child’s psyche and can give direction in terms of the needed bridge to liberation for the child, as the mother and father are fully alive in them, regardless of the quality or degree of contact.
As contractions tend to work through the domino effect, there will often be several reflections. For example, in addition to the conflict around purity, we might find that the mother is possessive and the father abandoning – reflecting through the child in a strong quality of care. The meta-dualities will also play out. The dynamic between war and surrender, for example, will evoke peace in the child – the child born to somehow bring peace to a conflictual relationship.
Often, the evolution of mastery in form around nondual qualities will have a thread that continues through generations, both through the maternal and paternal line and dancing between the genders. We will find families where life forms express degrees of mastery around the quality of freedom, for example, often with repeating themes of slavery and liberation, where the true nature of the quality irrespective of form is liberated.
The child in us is a sacred resource, and is often severed in the timeline through the intense years of puberty. That is, it is common to relate to childhood memory as if it were another person, and great shifts occur when the client is able to fully regress as the same ‘one’ as the child, rather than as a detached witness. This kind of regression involves direct re-experiencing of intimate atmospheres. These atmospheres will in their purity be pre-natal, as the first impressions and biochemical stress patterns arising in awareness in unity with the mother.
Access to the pre-lingual, responsive, spatial dimension of childhood impressions and atmospheres can be opened through moving through the timeline and recognizing the timeless ‘one’ in the childhood memory as the same ‘one’ that now sits as an adult in the now, and the same ‘one’ that will be experiencing the next day, and the last days of physical life.
MOTHER (Receptive)
The somatic template of the feeling connection to our inner mother is sourced in the spectrum of qualities and contractions alive in our own physical mother at the time of pregnancy and in infancy. While conventional schools of psychology will rarely admit that pre-lingual and pre-natal experience effects the psyche, in Nondual Healing these early vibrations in awareness are found to be formational. These are the essential atmospheres of home, the moods and attitudes that form states, seemingly inseparable from all experience.
As these primal vibrations are both the background and soil to all other experiences, they play a formational role through each contraction. While we can penetrate them at any moment, it is through the liberation of the nondual position of pure, unentangled awareness that they can emerge to the foreground. Sometimes called the dark-night of the soul, these subtle mists need to be realized as a relative and non-absolute and not as a fundamental part of experience in order for the process of self-realization to liberate the core of many contractions.
Such core atmospheres resonate with contractions around the nondual position of home (where the duality of familiarity and strangeness moves in contraction). They form as filters over consciousness itself, like the proverbial rose-pink sunglasses, or the perception of the world through clouded windows. Indeed, post-awakening, many will report the temporary lifting of these filters. Everything is seen as more alive, the light seems to have greater purity and colors are more vibrant.
When we are in the womb and in early infancy, we are in total biochemical unity with the mother. It is not only the conscious patterns of stress that imprint through vibration into our psychic physiology, but also the unconscious. In this, the full blend with the energetic patterns of the mother are also a blend with the mother’s mother and onwards, each womb containing the next. Indeed, the very law of attraction that led us to be conceived in form through her would have been the attraction towards a nondual quality in that moment, around which contractions are spiralling.
The formation of the psyche in utero is based on patterns of stress, harmony and dissonance, patterns experience first hand as identical to the core of the human self by the unborn child. The mother is not separate, but she is the gateway to the physical life and in this she is as fundamental as the whole universe.
After birth, the psyche continues to be formed by patterns of harmony and dissonance, with an increasing emphasis on patterns of separation. Birth, the great rupture from the mother’s body, is followed by reunion, but within this unity there is already a distance and the possibility of loss. The patterning of separation and disconnection is already forming the borders and sensitivities of the separate self, and the child’s later ability to stay in unity regardless of spatial distance and later, regardless of different feelings and perspectives.
The first patterns of dissonance or separation are experienced as the agony of rejection. This pain can be so uncontainable that an energetic freeze forms directly around the purity of love that connects mother and child. This can mean that in later life, vibrations of that love of the same frequency as the mother’s love create feelings of repulsion and compulsion. Beyond rationality enemies form in the social field, simply because of the resonance with this very early freezing of love.
Much has been written about the mother wound and the complex of dynamics for daughters in finding form in later life. Issues of loyalty and betrayal can feature strongly as the daughter chooses to express her freedom into the world where the mother remained enslaved. Rejection of daughters by mothers and vice versa can take tangible form as daughters strive to form happy relationships (or choose to leave unhappy ones) or endeavour successful careers.
Complications around the mother wound are still more harsh for males. While many daughters can retain the sense of unity with the mother while moving into separate form and without falling into symbiotic repetition of the mothers ‘law’, males are born in disconnection. From the moment gender is declared they are delineated as separate from the mother and begin to be formed in the role of perpetrator. This existential guilt in their being the essential cause of disconnection from the mother (universe) can widen the dimension of despair suffused with a sense of perennial condemnation. As a male they are at root cause of the mother’s sacrifice. Between the expectation that they will correct this pain and the impossibility of finding gender differentiation within unity, they can’t make it good for her. As a successful male (becoming the oppressor), they betray her, and as an unsuccessful one they disappoint her. They are damned if they do, damned if they don’t: disconnected from the source of all they are in human form.
In many instances, we are talking about a whole category of inherited trauma. To the post-traumatic slave syndrome, referred to in the chapter on Freedom, we could add post-traumatic gender syndrome. It is recent history that our mothers were sometimes incarcerated as insane simply because their husband wanted a divorce. A social field in which loss of a husband meant loss of livelihood, poverty and shame still leaves its patterns today. A single woman is designated a threat to family units, and a child-less woman is either pitied or socially estranged. These dynamics of oppression continue in many places in the world in physical form, and everywhere else energetically. They effect both mother and father, as well as the mother and father energy within ourselves. The healing opportunity is found in the birth of every fresh form – in every child and within the child that resonates as a beacon of light at the core of each of us.
FATHER (Active)
While the mother is the connection to the source, universe; or final relaxation, opening and receptivity in the psyche, the father is the active principle. The mother suffuses the inner world, while the father suffuses the so-called outer world. He is the template for activity, manifestation, and for ‘reality’ itself. Out of unity with the mother, the father is the first significant ‘other’. He stands for authority, law, and safety. He is often the bottom-line for the physical survival of the family unit.
In this the patterns of judgement of the father can seem to be absolute and can form beliefs around the nature of God the father (the fearful one, the absent one). These beliefs can be somatic, emasculating the son and robbing the daughter of her natural movement through time and space. Contractions around the nondual quality of Authority (inner authorship of our own reality) express through the duality of conformity and rebellion through every movement into the ‘outer’ world as well as in patterns of intimate relating. This contraction effects the flow of expression and by default the ability to receive. To say it simply, contractions around fatherhood directly effects our ability to manifest, to take form, and to dance in the world of duality.
While the mother wound spirals around the horror of betrayal, father wounds typically resonate around fears of abandonment and the pain of injustice. Yet so fundamental are the formational roles of the mother, father and the atmosphere of home on the psyche of each child, that each network of contractions is unique, just as each personality is unique.
CHILD: Nondual Quality
The nondual quality of the child has been reframed in current conditioning to the point of abuse. Dominant educational systems and culture rest on the premise that the child is a kind of untrained mammal, whose brain is inherently hollow. Left untamed, this mind will lead to bestiality – unbridled sexuality, violence, untold social offences and destruction. Similar misconceptions surround the nondual quality of the child as infuse our perceptions of freedom. These misconceptions rest on the premise that our true nature is cruel.
The unborn infant, the baby and the child are actually chiefly resting in pure awareness, out of which a naturalness of care, responsivity, connection and peace arise in and of themselves, without any need for inculcation. The mind of the child is akin to what Zen Buddhism has called: Beginners Mind. Unfettered by the conditioning of past, present and future; free of the agenda of perception that distorts consciousness with expectation, the child’s senses open out directly on the world with a freshness that is beyond selectivity. The child does not seek to make sense of what he or she sees. Rather, the child is the sensing itself.
In this chapter, we have touched on some of the afflictions connected to the male and female aspects of ourselves, as reflected through the father and the mother. These afflictions play out through limitations on movement through the world of duality. For example: they can block the cycle of receptivity and expression; they can create filters of atmospheric states on consciousness itself (such as an attitude of negativity); they can disturb the freedom in finding unique form while resting in unity.
These core colourings and patterns of the psyche can feel heavy, yet the child is not residing in them. In childhood, these patterns of loneliness and intimacy, abandonment and possession, strangeness and familiarity are surface textures to a universe filled with nondual quality. For the child, the story-line caught in time is mostly an abstraction. The habits of time, story, expectation, history, agenda and excuses are learned later. The child resides as the undivided, spatial, nondual quality of pure awareness. Within this awareness there are patterns of dissonance: rejection, stress, loss and discomfort. Yet this dissonance is relating to the world of form, a form of the psyche that is hardly developed and is in not yet confused as absolute. That is, the personality of the child is a kind of play-ground, just as even his or her name is a label that needs to be learned. The child is still free.
The perspective of the child is often one that brings shame. Just as so many of the nondual qualities have been distorted through popular conditioning, qualities of purity, innocence, freedom, trust, care, love and even peace are seen as weak, naïve and ‘childish’. To call someone ‘childish’ is to insult them. It seems we live in a culture where adulthood and maturity is often determined by the degree of contraction and separation from the source of ourselves as well as from each other.
The reclaiming of at least part of the inner child in order to have him or her open as a resource and guide is an important part of every process of freedom from contraction. The child is an inseparable resource of the whole, through which we emerge into physical life and through which we depart. Alive as the perfect blend between male and female aspects, the nondual position of the child can be the key that will unlock freedom of form and movement through releasing the dualities of push & pull, male & female, creation & destruction at a source level. Pure perception through the senses of the child are our first and last resource in living a human life cycle. We would do well to rest in it.
Form does not differ from the Child.
And the Child does not differ from Form.
Form is the Child and the Child is Form.
When father and mother dissolve, the Child is emerging.
July 8, 2017
All About Belonging 4-5-6 August 2017, Netherlands
Form does not differ from Belonging
And Belonging does not differ from Form.
Form is Belonging and Belonging is Form.
With Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson
ISSP, Biotoop, Haren, Netherlands,
August 4-5-6, 2017
A 3-Day gathering to open and find freedom within the nondual quality of belonging.
Working with:
Finding and deepening the feeling and felt sense of belonging, and noticing its effect on the body.
Giving space to contractions based on the duality of acceptance and rejection.
The horizontal dimension – the social field.
The horizontal dimension – the ancestral field
The vertical dimension – nature and the earth
The vertical dimension – religious & spiritual beliefs, and attitudes towards the source.
To find out more: info@iamhere.life
Tijd : Van 10.00- tot 18.00 uur.
Plaats : Kerklaan 30 te Haren (Gn)
Prijs : € 350,-
Betaling : Van tevoren op rekeningnr. NL49ABNA042.90.42.221.
Inschrijving : Via e-mail adres: info@iamhere.life
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Where acceptance and rejection dissolve, belonging is happening.
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