Georgi Y. Johnson's Blog: I AM HERE - Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty, page 3

Awakening the Field: Spiritual Psychology Module I

March 25 @ 3:00 pm – March 29 @ 11:00 pm

 Cost for 5 days & certification: $650

Spiritual psychology differs from conventional psychology in that it recognizes not only the healing power of spiritual aspects of experience but also the spiritual nature of profane experience.

In these online workshops held through ZOOM with Bart ten Berge & Georgi Y. Johnson, we employ multimedia techniques to describe and share energy exercises, and meditations to prepare the nerve system by safe degrees to unfold into the possibilities of direct experience. The training includes direct tuition from both Georgi Y, Johnson, and Bart ten Berge, with close attention given to the process of each individual. All from the comfort of your own home!

Module 1 introduces the energetic bodies and the chakra system and shares exercises to begin to experience the underlying unity beneath common ruptures in the psyche.

Together with Module 1 ISSP certification, all participants receive video recordings of the teachings for later review, as well as music used, and PDF workbooks of the material covered.

Daily schedule (PST)*:

7:00 am – 8:00 am: Talk, elucidating the principles of healing and spiritual psychology

8:00 am- 8:30 am: Break

8:30 am – 10:00 am: Meditation, explanation, sharing

10:00 am – 12:00 pm: Break

12:00 pm – 2:00 pm: Exercises, Partnerwork, Sharing, Q&A

*In Israel & Europe the clocks change during these days so we will sync to PST.

PaypalStripe Credit Card6-Month Payment Plan

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Birth, Death, and LIFE: Spiritual Psychology Module IV Online

April 1 @ 3:00 pm – April 5 @ 11:00 pm

 $650

Spiritual psychology differs from conventional psychology in that it recognizes both the healing power of spiritual aspects of experience but also the spiritual nature of profane experience.

In these online workshops held through ZOOM, we employ multimedia techniques to describe and share energy exercises, and meditations to prepare the nerve system by safe degrees to unfold into the possibilities of direct experience. The training includes direct tuition from both Georgi Y, Johnson, and Bart ten Berge, with close attention given to the process of each individual. All from the comfort of your own home!

Module 4 offers knowledge, meditations & energetic techniques to move beneath the threshold of consciousness and to access the pre-verbal depth of somatic memory. Part of this involves moving through the vibrational memory of our own birth.

In contacting the essential layers of living experience, we also gain the possibility to release patterns of affliction that could are imprinted through vibration on the sense of self before birth. This by itself relaxes and brings spaciousness to deep patterns of fear and resistance to life, which often show up as a denial of mortality through varying degrees of depression.

This is a powerful module, offering reunion and liberation at the core of individual manifestation.

Together with Module 4 certification as ISSP Adjunct Practitioners, participants receive video recordings of the teachings for later review, as well as music used, and PDF workbooks of the material covered.

Payment options:

Pay now with Paypal

6 Month Payment Plan for Modules in Spiritual Psychology

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Is it OK to take remedies for sleep?

What about “numbing” to help sleep? THC or melatonin or other natural sleep aids benefit by allowing sleep which is so important. But it also creates a bit of numbing, so relaxation can happen long enough for sleep.

Georgi: It’s horrible to lose sleep and it can feel like it threatens survival itself. The use of medication of all kinds can be a support to move through times of distress. Like the natural effect of numbing or dumbing in energetic contraction, drugs like melatonin and THC can help buy time and space to work things through. They can also help break vicious cycles of suffering in which sleep deprivation can exaggerate the core area of distress. Each individual must follow the compass of their own wellbeing and inner guidance in this. No-one else can tell you what works for you!

Natural sleep aids wash through the cellular membrane much more cleanly than their synthetic substitutes, which leave debris that clogs and confuses the cells’ receptors. But do remember that anything that works in terms of outer substance, only works because the body recognizes it from substance that the body itself produces.

For example, when we truly relax, a certain biochemistry follows, with sleepiness as the body will produce melatonin precisely for the purpose of comfortable emotional processing. This hormone is not born as a black-out but as a shelter for the twilight zones of experience. We have it to support organic processing, not to help us avoid it.

However, I would always lean against it, except in cases of pure mercy, and then I would view it as a short term strategy. This is because the belief that trauma or contraction held in the body and nerve system can be ultimately avoided through taking a pill is dodgy. Often, we are avoiding a conflict with our natural instincts and emotions (sexual, rageful), and this kind of vitality is so much stronger than any drug, So the combination can mess us up.

When we recruit numbness from the outside, it interferes with our natural protective systems (our natural numbing) and the process of finding holistic regulation. It gives a temporary sense of control at the expense of a long term state of submission.

Often, we turn to sleep aids as an antidote to other habits with substance. We believe we can discipline our brain chemistry, but this vastly underrates the chemistry of the whole body which is inseparable from the brain. The avoidance of helplessness, one way or another, will release itself through the realization of the quality of pure helplessness. It is full of the bliss of relief and there are ways to get there with far less distress.

Both Melatonin and TCH interact with the reward system of the brain. This system is delicate and highly responsive and is part of what we are trying to reclaim in relation to True Nature. For example, we are learning how to trust life, even if it involves death, and to feel the reward in that, or to be at peace even when there is a war going on, and to feel the reward of that.

The ability to move through a conflict is immediately answered by this biochemistry of reward which affirms the sense of fulfillment and new resilience. This further relaxes the nerve system, making the environment of the body-mind safer and more willing to sleep, (no matter what dreams may come). When we take an external drug, we disrupt this reward cycle which can then lead to a cycle of dependency on that drug. In confusing associating the reward of sleep with an outer substance, we lose power and direction.

One principle we have on our side when navigating suffering is the reclaiming and use of our natural rhythms. Circadian rhythms – (our natural rhythms of sleep and waking) can be disrupted by socially conformed rhythms, or sleep violation (trauma in which sleep was manipulated or disturbed). When we are able to work through such trauma and associated contractions, the benefits, and blessings multiply throughout the psyche with a direct impact on physical health and wellbeing. In addition, the emotional processing that takes place in the dream states or half-sleep is to our advantage, even when it is experienced as stressful.

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Do energetic contractions get more dense or heavy if they are old?

In working with contractions – is there more density the older they are. or can a newer contraction hold the same or greater weight/ presence?

Georgi: Great question! There is a felt sense of age, or even apparent timelessness, just as there can be a felt sense of newness or strangeness. The density of contractions is to do with:

1. The amount that they are condensed, according to survival responses (this can happen almost instantly if there is a great shock).

2. The use of the appearance of density (like a dense shell) as an inherited or conditioned coping strategy. In this case the dense defensive layer could be an old strategy used on a fresh wound.

3. The extra layers of the contraction (negation, guilt, resentment). Here, it could well be related to the longevity of the contraction

Follow the uniqueness of the contraction, and it will sing its melody and logic, bringing information in general about the formulas of contraction within that person’s psyche.

Q&A Archive on the Practice of Nondual Therapy

Do you have a question for Georgi in your work with Nondual Therapy? info@iamhere.life

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How do energetic contractions work with trauma?

I am a trauma therapist and earlier you said that once you have cleared the trauma you go back and clean up some of the residual contractions. Wondering what that would look like in practice?

Georgi: A cleared trauma looks like resilience – there is an alive and responsive ability to move in and out of the traumatic memory/field.

Work with residual contractions often involves life throwing the same thing back at us in Karmic forms in a series of reminders and realizations. (“NOW do you think you’re healed?”) This goes on until we no longer want to “get rid” of the trauma but rather begin to honor it as an evolutionary experience within the whole.

For example, the charge might have been released in the safety of therapy, but can you give a TED talk about it? Or what happens if a similar thing is threatened to someone external who is young and defenseless? Do we freeze?

A classic with trauma work in terms of unfinished business is the empathic role we have with the perpetrator. The perpetrator defines the experience, and the experience cannot be truly at peace when there is a self-awareness around being or becoming a perpetrator. This is often in the blindspot of conventional trauma healing and can leave residue contractions of guilt, shame, abuse – and a complicated relationship with power & manifestation.

Trauma always involves the blocking of access to a Nondual Quality. The quality or blend of qualities are energetically alive at the junction where the shock or trauma split the psyche (for example, the qualities of peace, trust, relaxation, and of course naturalness. In our fear of repetition, we unconsciously blame the quality for the shock and horror – as if it provoked it. The quality becomes prohibitive – (eg. “She is too pure for this world”, or “Don’t be too innocent!”) In this, the quality begins to be perceived as dangerous. There is more written about this here.

In the residue of trauma, a process will continue from a soul level in which the same quality becomes increasingly free to manifest here as integral to the bottom-up, top-down, embodied experience of being alive. When the quality is allowed to unconditionally come to life, then we have moved from healing trauma, into the deeper purpose and fulfillment of soul manifestation. Each step of this journey energetically brings its reward, as in its precise formation, is is a core of our life mission.

Q&A Archive on the Practice of Nondual Therapy

Ask Georgi a question about Nondual Therapy: info@iamhere.life

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How can I work somatically with trauma when I am physically limited?

My physical injury keeps me from being able to freely move and be in nature and keeps things more physically stuck as trauma is harder to work through without free movement.

Every trauma involves the felt sense of being trapped, losing the freedom of movement. It is a traumatic felt sense. Not an ultimate reality. Some kind of movement is always happening, everywhere in the visible field. There is no such thing as non-movement.

Each time we tell ourselves that we can’t, that we’re not free, that we are separately condemned and unhealable, we do a kind of violence to our living experience. This builds up and increases physical stress. So especially when working with the thin line between trauma and physical discomfort, be kind to yourself, be soft, let the care that moves with your consciousness be free of agenda and conditions. Above all, allow yourself the possibility of happiness, somewhere deep down, in being part of this journey.

It is a general rule of healing that life puts us where we need to be in order to grow through all dimensions. Your physical injury is conditioning your free physical movement, but it doesn’t prevent other kinds of movement, such as the movement of energy, or the free movement of consciousness.

Sometimes we need such an experience in order to release our notion that our wellbeing depends on the grosser material world.

We become physically blind, so that we might find our inner sight. We become physically compromised in movement, so that we might find our inner freedom to move.

The secret is in the causality. As long as we see the gross material vibration of form as an authority and creator of the subtle dimensions of ourselves, we become imbibed in limitations beyond what is necessary. Our physicality does not cause our existence, or the subtler dimensions of experience. It is quite the opposite. The causal layers – i.e. our freedom to reside in the infinitely regenerating qualities of true nature – have a direct formational impact on our physicality. We learn this through direct experience of checking it out in our own living field. But do check!

Try to prioritize and value your subtle energy and the inner world. It might be purer, and formless, but this doesn’t make it weak. Does your physical condition limit your imagination? Does it have the authority to restrain the freedom of your spirit? When you dream at night, do you dream of yourself with a physical limitations or are you free?

When we begin to allow the freedom of movement within ourselves, irrespective of physical conditions, then a whole adventure can open, perhaps based on wonder and curiosity in what it is possible to experience in the present and future, rather than on limitations that always belong to the past.

Q&A Archive on the Practice of Nondual Therapy

Do you have a question for Georgi in your work with Nondual Therapy? info@iamhere.life

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I AM HERE – LEXICON FOR LIFE

Forward to the second edition

WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE? Who is the one that is conscious of the question?

What do we feel we are? What within us can feel this energetic substance of self – this existential “you-ness” from behind time and space?

Where do we find ourselves? Can we be limited, caught, or ultimately defined? From where does location come? Where is the perceptive center of all dimensions of time and space, out of which all experience emerges?

I AM HERE is a text that takes us behind the mysteries of who, what, and where we are, through the primal portals of direct experience, to the singular source of the one that perceives – the source of you.

When I AM HERE was first published, many viewed it as abstract, conceptual, and beyond reach. Already in the last century, Jiddu Krishnamurti presented teachings aimed at shifting the human psyche beyond fear-driven prisons of mind and artificial structures of time, yet although he was honored, many deemed him incomprehensible. What hope could there be then, for a popular reception of a meditative work that aims not only to liberate the mind caught in forms of thought, but also the heart caught in densities of feeling, and the body trapped in reflexive patterns of stress and depression?

In its purity, I AM HERE describes phenomena that can easily be experienced by every one of us.

In the dimension of mind, it asks for mindfulness, which is chiefly mindfulness of the many ways we have been programmed into states of mental slavery. This slavery is found in the insistence that “I think therefore I AM.” If I don’t think with my head, I cannot exist. Check this out. Is it really true to our experience?

This is the dimension of thought, where many of us chiefly live. It is a different chamber from the dimension of feeling (where we experience, love, sadness, happiness, and all that for which we strive). This, in turn, is a different chamber from the dimension of physical sensation.

Just as different brain areas reflect information processing through these three dimensions of experience, so does each chamber of experience activate a subtly different perceptive faculty.

Mind

That awakened consciousness experienced when we release attachment to the linguistic structures of mind is often called transcendental, as it shifts our perspective to a place of overview, beyond the agenda of separate identity.

Conscious awakening releases us from the limitations of thinking patterns inherited from the past which are structured around the short-term, separate agenda to get the pleasure from life and not the pain.

Because we never feel quite sufficient in knowledge, reality, or truth, we try to conform to that which we are “supposed” to be, thinking that which we are “supposed” to think.

Caught in the wheel of separate survival, this area of the mind is programmed like an old binary computer, with either-or, mutually exclusive, options. It degrades experience to good or bad outcomes and generates enormous pressure in making the right, either-or choice. It antidotes this unbelievable mental stress by braving it out, setting up consensual truths in the form of the “known” and shutting down the mystery of infinite possibility found in higher faculties of the mind. In this contraction of mental ability, flexibility is lost, and the individual becomes even more unsafe in an exaggerated dependence on outer authorities for the “truth” or to reference “reality”. This further generates the biochemistry of stress and fear, locking down consciousness within the mind of duality. The binary mind is addicted to the dictation of experiential reality. Rather than receiving sensory and sentient impressions, it censors, creates, and tries to control them.

Because we never feel quite sufficient in knowledge, reality, or truth, we try to conform to that which we are “supposed” to be, thinking that which we are “supposed” to think. To do this, we split from our inherent direct experience, importing programs of conformity from consensual authorities that might pretend power, but are reactive and based on autonomous patterns for which no-one is either responsible or in control. Our mental form becomes subjugated to the dictates of fear – hardly taking form before it is deformed in order to conform to what we imagine the world wants of us.

Evidence that this state of mind is so prevalent (it is even blindly inculcated through our educational systems), doesn’t make it an ultimate reality. It might be a collective prison, but it is still a prison – a temporal restriction on the unending landscape of consciousness. Even though the software claims an exclusive hold on the processing of reality, that doesn’t give it a monopoly on experience. This collective conditioning of fear and threat – the murderous dictates of competing opposites within binary thought-forms – is unsustainable and generates existential fields of suicidal despair. It is a cuckoo’s nest which is disintegrating through epidemics of stress and the criminalization of existential freedom. In droves, individuals are flying out of the mental programming of thought-based limitation, and this is creating whole subcultures of conscious awakening and nondual wisdom.

It is a pandemic of sanity. Not the kind of socially conformed sanity positioned as a contra to the ominous threat of being deemed insane, but open-ended sanity that involves the pure sight and clarity of mind that is revealed when old thought forms lose the strength to conceal the unlimited power of consciousness. Though this infectious wave of awakening, original thinkers and changemakers are emerging in droves, through all walks of life.

When we become conscious not just of thoughts, but even conscious of consciousness itself, then a doorway opens to infinite mental possibility. It is a space of no thought, out of which every thought can arise, but through which it is realized that no thought-form can ultimately possess the consciousness that birthed it.

Zen Buddhism has called this the mind of non-discrimination. The mental shift from the discriminating. binary mind to include the mind of nondiscrimination, is akin to the shift from a mechanistic view of the world made of levers, triggers, and artificially composed sequences of cause and effect, to a quantum view. Whereas the mechanistic view offers a repeating drudgery of patterns, as the psychological machine grinds on with little real change from generation to generation, the quantum view reveals the skylight of freedom. This pure, unthreatened, unified field of light offers clarity, insight, inspiration, and natural genius to the human endeavor. It opens all possibilities. It resets the machine so that the miraculous has perceptive space to appear.

In terms of brain anatomy, we could see this shift in consciousness as a movement in which the prefrontal cortex is liberated, leading to an enlightening of possibility throughout the whole cerebral cortex, especially the midline between left and right brain regions. Neurologically seen, it is a nondual awakening out of the bias toward the “rational” mind. There is a liberation of light in which the binary, “either-or” dogmatism gives way to what feels like a transcendental dimension. The whole brain begins to reform neural networks in service of this field of existential freedom. The biochemistry of the brain also changes as the liberation of the sense of truth and the revelation of higher, unlimited conscious identity – the one, spiritual “I” – activates the reward system. This reward system is immensely healing, generating a sense of wellbeing, unconditional fulfillment, and bliss. Worldly addictions with overloads and whiplashes of guilt, shame, and stress, simply pale in the context of these clean, spontaneous, natural endorphins.

When we become conscious not just of thoughts, but even conscious of consciousness itself, then a doorway opens to infinite mental possibility.

Heart

When consciousness is released from the exclusive energetic clutch of thought forms, our second perceptive window – that of sentient awareness – opens more widely. The spatial dimension of the right brain areas can now become flooded with fresh sentience. We feel our feelings in the present moment. We do not feel them yesterday or later. Yesterday’s feelings can only be relived in the present moment. Tomorrow’s feelings can be anticipated in the present moment. All feeling only happens now.

The Now is the window through which we dive through the floor of mental dominance into the dimension of sentient awareness. The more we are at peace in the heart area, the more durable the effect of conscious awakening. When suffering in the heart seems impossible, we can bypass this pain by seeking increasing transcendental experiences through higher consciousness. This phenomenon is becoming known as spiritual bypassing, which can develop into spiritual psychosis. The gravitational pull to incarnate into the direct sentient experience of being alive is so strong, that to resist it is to create a split – a split which can only be sustained through dogmatic beliefs and a kind of spiritual covert aggression toward “life”. When the bright light of liberated godly consciousness shines on our worst sentient nightmares, it can feel like the most horrific and unexpected fall from enlightened grace. This is why the realization of the perceptive window of sentient awareness becomes so critical to wellbeing.

The gravitational pull to incarnate into the direct sentient experience of being alive is so strong, that to resist it is to create a split – a split which can only be sustained through dogmatic beliefs and a kind of spiritual covert aggression toward “life”.

This area of the heart – where we feel joy, happiness, belonging – or peace, is also an area of undefended suffering. Without the numbing shield of the thinking mind, there are energetic contractions that when exposed to the objectifying light of consciousness can freeze as impossible, or unbearable. This can result in the sense of “senselessness”, or a thick, liquid, feeling of “nothing”. It can seem so much easier to think about what or who we are than to feel the resonance of it in the present moment.

Our conditioning has told us there is nothing there. Our experience has told us that when something shows up there, it is mostly disturbance – a sense of heaviness, depression, or lack on the one hand, and an unforgivable rage, destructiveness, unreliable evil, or betraying horniness on the other. We learned young to censor feelings and emotions and to dishonor this dimension of experience as a kind of evolutionary quirk that distracts us from our role in life. This means that we cloud the window of sentient awareness, forgetting how to feel anything at all, and becoming locked down in cycles of stress and depression.

Even therapeutically seen, behavior, conformity, and functionality are often prioritized over the deeper and more authentic experience of the individual. Intimacy with feelings and emotions is discouraged. “Negative” feelings and emotions are denied, while “Positive” ones are seen as fortunate by-products of the restoration of functionality.

For example, it is good that a client finds peace as a by-product of returning to work and managing domestic responsibilities. But if he finds infinite peace – a peace that overwhelms his conditioning – then we have a problem. The same goes for happiness. Psychology looks for us to be almost happy, but not unconditionally happy because that is somehow judged as delusional.

Another example is if someone uncovers the essence of unconditional wellbeing. The very software of collective conditioning demands that we never pass through the doorways of the unconditional. We need to worry, regret, be afraid, and strive to improve, or else we will fail. Failure means the most unbearable, amorphous, thing that we’ve been running from our whole lives will finally happen. We will be overcome by the danger which we dread so much to the core that we forgot what it is. Unconditional wellbeing deflates the threat which gets us all running to the unsynchronized rhythms of fear.

When we drop back into pure sentience, resting as that living entity that is able to “feel” all varieties of experience, then there is an empowerment of the heart. The window of sentient awareness opens. Our conscious attention is now following the revelation of sentient experience. It does not dictate feelings or emotions, trying to conform them to established norms, but rather honors the space of awareness in which they arise as sentient vibrations and through which they form and transform. This sentient awareness is at once fully empathic and intimate with the resonant content of our feelings, at the same time, that it is the sky through which the weather of our feelings and emotions moves.

Obstruction, restriction, contraction, and affliction in the energy of feelings of emotions, that cloud the vista of the heart, cause disturbances in the mind, contorting, and filtering mental consciousness.. We are so thoroughly taught to bypass our feeling awareness, that we often reach way too far out into the neverlands to try and solve the problems and unbearable restlessness we feel on the inside. The need to realize the window of awareness is so deep and central to the holistic needs of the whole human psyche, that this part of I AM HERE – the section on “AM” or “Being” has birthed the whole field of Nondual Therapy. The book: Nondual Therapy – The Psychology of Awakening lists over 100 contractions of spiritual qualities or qualities of our true nature, together with their associated contractions.

The resourcing of the qualities of true nature – which spontaneously arise as effects of liberated consciousness and awareness – presents a psychotherapeutic revolution. The introduction of love as being present even within the field of hatred, or the sense of belonging in and around the suffering of rejection (for example) has a transformational effect on experience which increases resilience within suffering without dumbing, numbing, or shunning any thought, feeling or emotion.

Since Nondual Therapy emerged out of the I AM HERE teachings, this deeply holistic and scientifically validated field is budding across the world and is increasing both in the number of practitioners and the demand for more enlightened forms of therapy.

Body

While the heart level – our sentient awareness – is critical to integration and mental wellbeing, it cannot be divided from the physical manifestation of the whole. To split the dimension of sentience from our physicality is to create an artificial floor of being – a threshold of consciousness – around the solar plexus. When we stand on this shaky floor, we conflict with our physicality (without really experiencing its miracle), and our sentience is unsupported.  When the floor of our sentience is fear or the resistance to physical life, it can be hard to release energetic contractions. Experience remains conditional, often based on the fear of suffering associated with death or annihilation. This is why falling through the floor of basic fear into the dimension of perceptive emptiness is a master key to holistic liberation.

Only through the passage into emptiness do we become unconditionally free to dance in duality, through all forms of experience, without shrinking according to the dictates of fear. We even become free to be afraid, but fear now works for us as part of our orchestra of sensitivity, rather than against us as the prison warden of limitation.

To be alive is no longer to be trapped in life.

When liberated consciousness and sentient awareness – mind and heart – are no longer in conflict with each other, the two faculties blend, and we find that we are this existential perceiver that is outside of space and time, unchanging and undying, that underlies all experience.

In falling back as this living channel of perceptive singularity, stress releases out of a field of spiritual tiredness, and experience is released from prescriptive agendas. To be alive is no longer to be trapped in life. It’s no longer a subtle punishment, test, or unwritten assignment. Rather than being caught in a state of punitive detention, where we are obliged to compensate our own emanation with good behavior, we find we are now invited into a playing field of unrestricted possibility. This field of possibility is unconditional – it is unconditional even to the conditions of form. It reveals itself through an ingenious evolution toward the wellbeing of the whole. Through perception through emptiness, the underlying beauty of true nature can be experienced through perpetually alive impressions and expressions through all vibrations of form.

This window of perception is entered through the direct miracle of physical sensation in the here and now. The awakening of conscious awareness, deep inside the body, asks that our perception be cleansed of all agenda which often shows up in the subtle resonance of attitudes glued to consciousness on the one side and states of being on the other. Attitudes of consciousness can include, for example, an attitude of having to push or exert ourselves to gain something. States of being can include atmospheric backgrounds at the backdrop of reality such as gloominess or doom. They are unconscious until they become apparent as subtle vibrations in that space where we awaken within the physical body.

When we drop into pure perception and consciously touch the vibrational layers of physical manifestation, a field of pure possibility opens which is now incarnated, showing the potential of full human manifestation. A new kind of unity opens which includes the physical dimension and reduces any need to be fearful of physicality. Projections of form onto the physical dimension break down, and the mind begins to receive the miracle of living material, directly from the field of the unknown. With this, empires of stress and legacies of fear begin to release as the energetic material of experience out of the very cells of the body.

Real change occurs, which opens the wonder and realization of the naturalness of physical healing. We no longer work against the body, in its precious fragility and destiny. We are alive as a body, knowing the awe of the body as a miraculous emanation of life.

When we touch emptiness, then our sentient awareness is supported in even deeper liberation from the compulsion to contract fields of suffering. When we touch emptiness, then also the field of awakened consciousness is liberated, opening the primary organ of perception – the brain – as the receptive headquarters of multidimensional information.

All this leads to expression and manifestation unfettered by fear. This is what Buddhists have called the end of suffering or the deathless state. When we know the end of suffering and are no longer limited by the fear of death, then the deepest compassion for all forms of life is free to flow through us. This brings tremendous fulfillment and unconditional reward. We have transitioned from slavery to freedom and in this, perception of reality transforms, to an alive unfolding of a shared process that is far more truthful and purposeful than anything we knew before.

I AM HERE & New Scientific Insights

In the seven years since the first publication of I AM HERE, scientific, therapeutic, and cultural shifts have further validated its founding inspiration.

Polyvagal Theory and the work of Dr. Steven Porges[ii] has added to the field of Somatic Experiencing with tremendous insights around the role of the vagus nerve. This “wandering nerve” is the longest cranial nerve, stretching from the brain stem to the colon and with sensors on every physical organ. The vagus nerve is involved in energizing, awakening, and healing the physical body, physical heart, and physical brain. Yet most of the information it carries is sentient, meaning not only about physical stress or distress, but also emotional. The vagus nerve literally mediates between the part of our psychological physiology related to fear, conscious awakening, and shock, and that which is related to rest, digestion, processing, and contemplation.

That is, with fibers deep into the pelvic area, the vagal nerve allows the vibrational dance between the sympathetic part of the nerve system (which is involved with conscious awakening) and the parasympathetic (connected with sentient awareness). It is the perceptive information highway of physicality, sentience, and mental processing. When it is free, then experience is free. We are no longer hijacked by fear or afraid of being overwhelmed by any other kind of feeling or emotion. We shift from being captivated in agendas of survival as a separate entity, into the liberation of existence in the here and now. When this shift happens, the same neurological patterns reset to naturalness. Their natural function is in processing the miracle – in allowing the incredible charge of energetic arousal to move through the whole form and into the whole universe of forms. This deeper passion is motivational, inspirational, and fundamental to our sense of purpose and wellbeing. This in turn is immediately awakening the biochemistry of reward and fulfillment. The vagus nerve is now of service to the splendid movement of manifestation of our uniqueness as an inseparable expression of the unity of the whole. The deeper, more inclusive celebration of healing begins. The genius within this movement of passion is described in the book Nondual Passion.

From the sensory networks of the body to the cardiovascular networks of our endocrine and immunological systems, we find that a parallel, scientific, psychophysical revolution has occurred over the past decade. Through her research and in her book The Molecules of Emotion[iii], the late Dr. Candace Pert reveals to us through scientific evidence that has always been experientially apparent – that there is a direct and precise biochemical reflection of feelings and emotions.

The way we feel is not only the result of the biochemistry of the body, but it is also generating certain biochemistry. This means that the healing power of love, or perhaps even the effect of prayer is no longer unsubstantiated “woo-woo.”

Another development since I AM HERE’s first publication has emerged in the therapeutic arena of psychological inheritance. Research in the field of epigenetics has shown how trauma, or incomplete cycles of experience disrupted by stress, becomes encoded in the inheritance of the genes. Here, in the tiny, vibrational zone at the core of our physical cells, core disturbances generate emotional resonance and patterns of stress, thought, and behavior. This is such a clear example of how there is no such thing as “away” – an empty unconscious space where we can forever discard broken pieces of ourselves. The body keeps the score, stores the information, and releases it through an ongoing interplay with the environment out of which it is formed.

Only processes of emptiness – sometimes resembling a shamanic journey or a bardo state – have the power to release and reintegrate these lost and restless phantoms of pain.

As we look deeper, through an experiential lens, into the body, it becomes clear also that in the core of our bones – in that part of our anatomy that is considered most ancient and least alive – we are perpetually sourcing stem cells. Stem cells are the undifferentiated master cells of all life. Biologically seen, they are the equivalent of the field of infinite possibility. Like that field of the unmanifest that fills the emptiness, they take form according to the needs of the whole. The differentiation of stem cells into manifest forms happens according to the resonance of need. The more aligned we are to the deeper needs of the whole, beyond even the divisors of the separate self, the greater our physical attunement to wellbeing through all vibrations of form.

This new science invites us to take responsibility for the spiritual qualities of our true nature – those unconditional fields of resonance which are not pleasant accessories but rather are fundamental to our physical, mental, and psychological naturalness. As the current epidemic of stress, depression, and opiate abuse reaches unsustainable proportions, the need to rediscover, remember, and resource our true nature becomes increasingly immediate.

We are not passive recipients of an inert physical body, but the active field of conscious resonance through which the physical form manifests. When we find ourselves as that existential source of all form, through the windows of perception, we become observer participants, dancing through time in the unfolding of all creation through our conscious awareness.

Therapeutic fields that have grown out of these somatic insights have shown how powerful bodywork can be in processes of psychological healing, and how inseparable and permeable is the boundary between thought, feeling, and sense perception. All impressions arise, merge, and temporarily differentiate within the field of experience – the playing field of perception through emptiness.

This inseparability becomes apparent through the suffering caused where we try to exclude one of the perceptive windows – for example, to exclude the body in an emotional process, or to exclude the mind in a medical process, or to exclude feelings in either a physical or mental process. Yet inclusion is only possible through the liberation of the windows of perception – one way or another – in a way described by I AM HERE.

Just as in naturalness, a cat can be in one moment all-claws and in the next moment merging in seamless unity, and in the next, giving birth to her young with spontaneous knowhow and grace, so are we hardwired for the natural wellbeing and aliveness that comes forward when we move beyond the limitations of perception.

At first, this could be through becoming conscious of consciousness and witnessing our life beyond any local thought-form. Next, it could be becoming aware of awareness – resting as pure, unconditional sentience in an unconditional availability to any vibration. And of course, our passion, power, and purpose here are inherent to the movement moving as the miracle of physical manifestation – the vessel through which all thoughts and feelings are temporarily anchored in the miraculous touching point of being alive for real.  In this moment of pure physical aliveness, heaven is revealed in the wildflowers of true nature.

We perpetually arrive to a home we find we never left.

Georgi Y. Johnson, December 2020

[i] Nondual Therapy – The Psychology of Awakening, Georgi Y. Johnson

[ii] The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation; Stephen Porges

[iii] The Molecules of Emotion: Dr. Candace Pert

The post I AM HERE – LEXICON FOR LIFE appeared first on I AM HERE.

Can Nondual Therapy be applied to schizophrenia or any of the mental health issues?

Nondual Therapy can be used as a way to support people in dealing with fear, conflicts, and stress in all forms, including mental disorders.

The insight behind this is that the existential, healing qualities of true nature, such as peace, compassion, or curiosity are sourced from the wider circle, from the depth of ourselves, not from the personality. This means that these aspects of true nature are available even when there is intense personal suffering. There is a deep honor in this toward the one who is experiencing mental distress. 

For example, when our consciousness meets their consciousness, there no longer needs to be shame, stigmatization, humiliation or existential danger in the condition of mental crisis. A disordered mind does not make a disordered consciousness. Consciousness is witnessing (together with the therapist) what the body/mind is experiencing. This witnessing position, (to meet the client there and affirm it) is very important in mental distress. It brings time and space to allow a calming of the physiology, and keeps the one that is suffering in safe connection, even while the suffering is happening.

Each person is unique in their central themes, but the Nondual Qualities to work with, in ‘Schizophrenia’, could include:

Insight (Duality of Insanity – Sanity)Manifestation (Duality of Creation – Destruction)Discernment (Duality of Good – Evil)Power (Duality of Victim – Perpetrator)Peace (Duality of War – Surrender)Genius (Duality of Stupid – Smart)Curiosity (Duality of Expectation – Disappointment)Stillness (Duality of Active – Receptive)Silence (Duality of Noise – Quiet)Sovereignty (Duality of Narcissism – Sycophancy)Honor (Duality of Pride – Humiliation)Equality (Duality of Inferior – Superior)Consciousness (Duality of Subject – Object)Naturalness (Duality of Trauma – Shock)

I hope this is helpful!

When you say “Be open to the unknown”, do you mean: “Go with the flow” in life?

Going with the flow could be part of how we navigate life and our attitude to a situation. Flow moves us beyond subject and object – beyond the belief in absolute duality. This includes the way of seeing the world as an empty space full of objects which collide and conflict, in which we are one of those objects.

At the same time, when we open to the unknown, we’re not only referring to what we do, but also our availability to receive impressions of the ‘world’, unconditionally, which means to release into the freedom of pure experience without censorship or the restriction of fear.

The mystery of being has many doorways prior to action.

One way to find the bliss in this is to agree to not know and to stay in that open door of not knowing.

Who am I? I don’t know.

What am I? I don’t know.

Where am I? I don’t know.

What should I do? I don’t know.  

When we can let ourselves shine in the purity and humility of that at first awful insecurity, an awakening happens – a kind of baptism in the unknown. We move from the awful not knowing to the awesome receptivity of being open to all knowing. We shift from needing to know, based on our deeper fears, to the wonder of revelation/ guidance/ intuition.

There is a receptivity that opens up together with the humility and curiosity that allows us to receive impressions without grasping for conclusions.

In a way, then we are no longer going with the flow, but the universe is flowing into us, offering precisely what is needed for the wellbeing of the whole (including us).

The flow is that pure movement of life in which the unknown and the know melt into the freedom of knowing.

More Questions & Answers about Nondual Therapy & the Psychology of Awakening

How can I be with someone who is triggered from a nondual perspective?

A key approach is in the discernment between the trigger, and that pain which is touched.

We tend to try and get rid of the triggers, but that pain will just keep finding them. The pain causes the triggers, rather than the triggers causing the pain.

This means that the healing is to be found in the pain itself, not in the avoidance of triggers. 

The pain is often about the sense of lack of a Nondual Quality. For example, lack of love, lack of value, lack of freedom.

As we’ll learn, these qualities are infinite and always available when the mind moves from the either-or to the and-and. 

The art of being with someone who is triggered is to ‘be with’ someone without judgment as they process the triggered distress. Just this being this ‘being’, will begin to evoke the needed Nondual Quality into the field of experience. Welcome it as also present – “and I could kill you and I care immensely about you.”

This is simple to say, but not easy. Partly, it’s hard because the resonance of pain or trauma evokes the resonance of pain or trauma. That means that in all probability, part of us gets triggered by the triggering. Then it can be a competition about the legitimacy of pain or a conflict around the fundamental right to exist. When it’s like this, at least one of us needs to put our personality aside and to dedicate some time and space to the pain of the ‘other’. To totally be of service – through the I AM HERE FOR YOU (unconditionally). This simple sovereignty – even the admission that I suffer when you suffer – can bring a spaciousness and unfolding out of the field of conflict and into togetherness in a living process.

More Questions & Answers about Nondual Therapy & the Psychology of Awakening