Nondual Healing
Nondual Healing™ is a profoundly transformative and deeply nourishing form of healing. It integrates the wisdom of Buddhism and Advaitic understandings of nonduality with the wisdom of the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life, along with modern psychological insight.
It is a radical healing paradigm that is based on having a dynamic, living relationship with Reality As It Is. Awakening and healing are one. To awaken is to heal; to heal is to awaken.
Nonduality is what the world already is. It is the name we give for the understanding that Reality is One and not two. Or, put another way, Reality is filled with things that appear distinct, while they are also not separate.
Fundamentally, to engage with Nondual Healing is to be in relationship with all that it means to be a human being, living a fully human life. Duality, or the ordinary human life of individuality and separateness is united with the Absolute, also known as Transcendence or Emptiness—or, more accurately, they are revealed as two faces of All That Is.
As human beings, we have a type of consciousness that has the ability to look at itself and reflect upon itself. This ability can be highly beneficial and is actually quite remarkable. In this, we have the capacity to have relationship and beauty, change and growth. From a healing standpoint, we can look at our ideas and concepts of who we believe ourselves to be. We can realize ways we are playing out old dramas and stories of our childhood. We can see ways we are caught in repeating old patterns of relationship, ways that we are caught in judgments or limitations, and so forth. We can transform and heal.
At the same time, this ability causes us to feel separate from ourselves, from our lives as they are happening, from others around us, and from the world as a whole. We think we are living in life; life does things to us; or life will come to an end.
All of these perceptions or views of Reality mean that we relate to ourselves, to life, in particular ways—ways in which we are separate beings only, ways in which we must defend against the aspects of life we do not like or against the unknown. We feel separate from life even as it is happening. This is the root of our suffering, handed down from one generation to the next. We seek out a form of safety that keeps us separate in ongoing, ever repeating patterns of relating. We have a small view of life, of time, and of life and death. This is the lived sense of duality.
If we favor a transcendent or absolute view while still believing in our separateness only, then we seek to transcend or escape our human life, with all of its difficulties, challenges and confusions. We want to be saved from our lives and think the only hope is to “get out of here.”
This is not true nonduality. It does not represent fundamental healing or transformation. It may work for a time, but we end up feeling dissatisfied and unhappy, and—saddest and most painful of all—we do not discover the true gifts and joys of being a human being.
In order to truly heal, we need to learn how to embrace our personal self, the one who was born to such and such parents, has had such and such difficulties and challenges, and continues to wrestle with them today as an adult. We need to fully embrace where we are now, as well as where we’ve been.
To try to get to oneness without understanding the realities of being separate, with all of our limitations, is not to reach true nonduality. Skipping the step of being a human being in favor of some mistaken idea of nonduality (transcendence only) creates a profound imbalance in our essential nature and does not bring us to the true nondual light we deeply long for.
However, if we inquire into the facets of life that make us believe we are separate-only beings, sincerely and with kindness and honesty, then we have the ability to find an even more fascinating and amazing truth: that we are not separate at all, that what we take for our most separate piece, our sense of being an “I” is held in common by all manifest creation. The most ordinary of miracles is revealed: God or Reality or Wholeness (all names for the One) is right here, now, in our lives as they are.
This is who we are, and, paradoxically, it often takes hard work to become what we already are. That’s the strange truth of this universe, and it is also a deep blessing and joy as we awaken to it.
Awakening in this way brings us again and again to the compassion that is inherent in this world of ours, this human life, and to the beauty of everything within us and around us, other human beings, trees, plants, animals, the earth, the sky. The heavens and the earthly realm are one.
This is the awakening of the intelligence of the heart, the full ability to live a human life, surrounded and filled with grace, at home in ourselves and in this world.
As we learn to honor all of who we are, we are naturally much more able to honor all of life—differences, difficulties, continual change—and the holiness of all.
NKH Four-year Program Brochure and Application for October 2020 in NYC with Eileen Marder-Mirman and Jeff Ellias-Frankel