I offer support to individuals in understanding, navigating, and recovering from damaging, soul-deadening effects felt from disocciative forms of non-dual teachings, experiences, and practices.
Keep it simple on this page? touch on the deeper stuff but link to sections elsewhere that go more in depth to the topics, to the rabbithole and my recovery process methods - 2 wings of bird for example - detailed descriptions of the hole, and don't forget to include somewhere your detailed lists of things you can help people with that is in evernote
Something like this an a empathic high level intro to the crises that Neo leads to that I support people with.
We’re all trying to find a way to cope with the horrors of human life that coincide with the beauty and joy. Spirituality that aims to free us from suffering by de realizing "the one who suffers" is bypassing and disassociation and when spirituality becomes centered around relieving suffering by negating the “one who is suffering” (disassociating with one’s humanity) is one way people try that ends up often tragic, resulting in suicide and severe psychological and relational impairment that can be long-lasting. Enter: the Neo-Advaita Rabbithole (not just neo-advaita)*
^ as in neo-advaita is an especially tragic, but understandable avoidance coping mechanism/form of spiritual bypassing
We’re all trying to find a way to cope with the horrors of human life that coincide with the beauty and joy. Spirituality that aims to free us from suffering by de realizing "the one who suffers" is bypassing and disassociation and when spirituality becomes centered around relieving suffering by negating the “one who is suffering” (disassociating with one’s humanity) is one way people try that ends up often tragic, resulting in suicide and severe psychological and relational impairment that can be long-lasting. Enter: the Neo-Advaita Rabbithole (not just neo-advaita)*
^ as in neo-advaita is an especially tragic, but understandable avoidance coping mechanism/form of spiritual bypassing
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This support is similar to spiritual emergency/crisis support. The word "rabbithole" is used mainly for when someone reaches a point of what's called a spiritual emergency, or spiritual crisis, which can come after stages of positive-only growth and experience, and is marked by profound dis-orientation.
This support is similar to spiritual emergency/crisis support. The word "rabbithole" is used mainly for when someone reaches a point of what's called a spiritual emergency, or spiritual crisis, which can come after stages of positive-only growth and experience, and is marked by profound dis-orientation.
Disclaimer - Not Psychotherapy
This peer support isn't psychotherapeutic in nature, and definitely not intended to be a substitute for an ongoing relationship with a psychotherapist, or other healing/mental health professional. Many are working with therapists happily, but finding that they simply cannot relate to this part of their experience, and that connecting with someone who has shared their experience feels like a critical necessity/pre-requisite...
This peer support isn't psychotherapeutic in nature, and definitely not intended to be a substitute for an ongoing relationship with a psychotherapist, or other healing/mental health professional. Many are working with therapists happily, but finding that they simply cannot relate to this part of their experience, and that connecting with someone who has shared their experience feels like a critical necessity/pre-requisite...
Why me?
How I'm someone who has experienced it and knows it intimately from the inside - as in, why get help from me specifically?
I know it's abyssimal depths intimately from the inside, the tight crevices and bleak boundless expanses, despite my terror that it would never happen, with the support of others, I was able, with great challenge, to find my way out of it and can share what's worked for me and others. Went from disappearing to un-becoming no-one, re-emergence of sensory and conceptual individual, personal selfhood and all dimensions of my humanity as real, celebration-worthy preciousness, worthy of healing and flourishing, within a worldview/experience that is vastly different, but still has oneness, unity, but a different kind that both/and, and isn't non-dual, if anything it is uni-dual.
You need someone who has been ushered into that world and perception that neo leads you into, who deeply knows all of the messages absorbed, and the nuances of the ways they affect you and your way of perceiving, being internally oriented on an experiential level… which is hard to fully grasp the nuances of unless you’ve been there!
Someone who has also experienced both the “light” the liberating, positively experienced effects, as well as the dark, toxic, and disfunctional.
I want all who feel helpless to know...
I want all who are feeling helpless in it, to know that as harrowing as it is, climbing out of the "neo advaita" (insert other self-negating form of non-duality) rabbithole can be a profound journey ultimately leading to reviving all dimensions of our humanity,
a celebration of life's vibrant multi-dimensional richness and the resilience of the individuated, fully-human spirit.
Goal of a one-off meeting / and all meetings
If someone can leave a meeting feeling seen, heard, understood, more safe, and hopeful, then it has been a success.
If someone can leave a meeting feeling seen, heard, understood, more safe, and hopeful, then it has been a success.
1:1 Rabbithole Lifeline - Peer Support
I know it's abyssimal depths intimately from the inside, the tight crevices and bleak boundless expanses, despite my terror that it would never happen, with the support of others, I was able to find my way out of it.
I want all who are feeling helpless in it, to know that as harrowing as it is, climbing out of the "neo advaita" (insert other self-negating form of non-duality) rabbithole can be a profound journey ultimately leading to a celebration of life's vibrant multi-dimensional richness and the resilience of the individuated, fully-human spirit.
If someone can leave an initial consultation feeling seen, heard, understood, more safe, and hopeful, then it has been a success.
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Collective Soul Revival - A Peer Support Group
Training/Experience
And...6+ years learning about the historical context of modernized self-negating Eastern-derived spirituality, Neo-Advaita, and the nuances of both the light and dark side of these paradigms and how to recover from the latter.
I can emphasize with the positive side too!
It's important for you to know that I’m able from personal experience, to recognize, talk about, and empathize with positively experienced effects of these paths. My intimate knowledge their dark side is inextricably tied to having experienced the brightest of it’s light.
- Spiritual Emergency Coach Certification with the Integrative Mental Health University (IMHU) (2022)
- Entails certification to co-facilitate peer support groups for Spiritual Emergencies (My IMHU directory profile)
- Experience facilitating small online peer support groups for individuals recovering from adverse effects of/wanting to move away from Advaita-style non-dual spirituality based on self-negation
- Email support responder with the Spiritual Crisis Network (SCN) (2022-2023)
- Positive Psychology Practitioner Certification with the School of Positive Transformation (2018)
- 3 years deeply immersed in self-negating non-dual teachings as well as what's called the "direct experience" of what these teachings point to, during which my personal sense of self and reality collapsed repeatedly, and my sense of self eroded to the point of describing what I experienced as the "die before you die" kind of "ego" death
And...6+ years learning about the historical context of modernized self-negating Eastern-derived spirituality, Neo-Advaita, and the nuances of both the light and dark side of these paradigms and how to recover from the latter.
I can emphasize with the positive side too!
It's important for you to know that I’m able from personal experience, to recognize, talk about, and empathize with positively experienced effects of these paths. My intimate knowledge their dark side is inextricably tied to having experienced the brightest of it’s light.
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Some want One-off Conversations & others want Ongoing Support in Rabbithole Recovery
Some want One-off Conversations & others want Ongoing Support in Rabbithole Recovery
Some people will just want to have a one-off conversation to share their story with someone who can relate and make them feel validated, ask for resources/references, ask a burning question/s, etc.
Others will want to have ongoing support that goes deeper, further, covers more territory.
Others will want to have ongoing support that goes deeper, further, covers more territory.
Grounding Process Support
2 wings of the bird
2 wings of the bird specific to grounding (so it's not just about understanding authoritarianism, etc. - that's a separate piece that requires ongoing healing - more wounding/trauma-based - I can help them understand the authoritarianism but not necessarily guide them through the traumatic wounding healing part that a psychotherapist could be better for/the ) talk somewhere about how a lot of how I help is psycho-education, educational in general. The understanding of what's happened and the whole paradigm, piece.
Somatic & ideological - belief system- philosophical/meaning-level grounding - feedback loop description here again
1 - sensory/somatic- re-association, re-embodiment, re-realization, on a somatic level - universal & some specific grounding resources.
***somatic grounding at this point can't work well if you are still absorbing and engaging in un-grounding teachings that counteract it and which ungrounded you in the first place. So you have to put those aside at this stage.
If you are doing somatic grounding but continuing to believe or actively absorb ungrounding frameworks of meaning, it's going to counteract it.
Both the body and the belief system need to be grounding/ed
2- (Constructively) De-constructing the ungrounding/ed teachings/philosophical paradigm - ontology, etc. (epistemology/ical exploration is one of the tools here)
so that you can then be free to explore, choose, and consciously (re) construct a different one that IS grounded/grounding.
This is the mental-level of soul-revival and coming out of the rabbithole, that is symbiotic with sensory grounding. (feedback loop - create a visual image specific to neo rabbithole ideology deconstruction). This is just general here, but there can be links to more specifics.
Somatic & ideological - belief system- philosophical/meaning-level grounding - feedback loop description here again
1 - sensory/somatic- re-association, re-embodiment, re-realization, on a somatic level - universal & some specific grounding resources.
***somatic grounding at this point can't work well if you are still absorbing and engaging in un-grounding teachings that counteract it and which ungrounded you in the first place. So you have to put those aside at this stage.
If you are doing somatic grounding but continuing to believe or actively absorb ungrounding frameworks of meaning, it's going to counteract it.
Both the body and the belief system need to be grounding/ed
2- (Constructively) De-constructing the ungrounding/ed teachings/philosophical paradigm - ontology, etc. (epistemology/ical exploration is one of the tools here)
so that you can then be free to explore, choose, and consciously (re) construct a different one that IS grounded/grounding.
This is the mental-level of soul-revival and coming out of the rabbithole, that is symbiotic with sensory grounding. (feedback loop - create a visual image specific to neo rabbithole ideology deconstruction). This is just general here, but there can be links to more specifics.
Sensory Grounding WING - probably for another section
Master List of techniques
open.substack.com/pub/thegloriousbothand/p/master-list-grounding-resourcestechniques?r=2ooyr3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Getting grounded involves a process of re’s - re-association, re-orientation, re-realization, re-personalization/individuation, re-materialization, and grounding practices, techniques, resources are the most foundational element. Grounding practices eventually help us revive our personal me-ness, and experience ourselves a real, separate parts of the world again, in a real world, re-connecting us with the tangible, the material, engaging all of our senses, as well as re-associating us with our own individual tangibility, embodiment, physical boundaries/containment. They help call us back into our bodies, calm our spinning-out thoughts, anxiety and take us back to the earthy, the sensual. touching and being touched by it! To feel tangible, locatable, able to touch and be touched. Our grounding process brings back to life and re-connects entire dimensions of our humanity - first and foremost our physicality/body/sensuality - that we have abandoned, let atrophy/fade away, become dis-connected from, etc. It’s the road to reviving our souls, feeling fully human again, able to feel, appreciate, savor and be touched by all of life’s precious richness.
Spiritual Crisis/Emergency
In my work, these resources are most frequency used by those in a distinctive form of all-consuming, extremely profound existential crises directly resulting from types of spiritual teachings, practices, experiential shifts, that undermine one’s core conceptual and physical sense of self and reality.
The crisis is distressing enough to impair/impede one’s normal daily functioning as a self-responsible individual, within relationships, as well as carrying out societal roles. The distressing, disorienting and dysfunction-inducing symptoms are all-consuming in that they are consistently the central focus of one’s attention, and it’s extremely difficult to focus on anything else.
NOT JUST NEO-ADVAITA Rabbitholes” & More - this is a good thing to include where you introduce the sensory grounding wing of the bird - and where you explain you support more than neo-advaita experiencers - that it's a wider umbrella - where you even define NEO? Less people come from traditional, more from NEO
While these grounding resources are for any kind of disassociative (disembodying, de-personalizing, de-realizing) spiritual crisis, I am particularly focused on supporting those going through a very distinctive type of spiritual emergency, which many people refer to as a “neo-advaita rabbithole.” Though this term is specific to neo-advaita (contemporary versions of Advaita Vedanta) being the source of the symptoms, most of the symptoms overlap with SE’s triggered by all forms of self & world denying (or illusorizing) non-dual teachings, practices, and shifts - all based on the no-self or “true self” doctrine - in all cases the self is reduced to an impersonal amorphous X (referred to in varying ways). This includes branches of Buddhism (often Tibetan & Zen Buddhism, including things like Vipassana meditation, “pointing out” practices like Dzogchen, self-inquiry (Hindu), etc. What’s shared is that they all have elements that often lead to dissociative, dis-embodying, de-personalizing experience.
Master List of techniques
open.substack.com/pub/thegloriousbothand/p/master-list-grounding-resourcestechniques?r=2ooyr3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Getting grounded involves a process of re’s - re-association, re-orientation, re-realization, re-personalization/individuation, re-materialization, and grounding practices, techniques, resources are the most foundational element. Grounding practices eventually help us revive our personal me-ness, and experience ourselves a real, separate parts of the world again, in a real world, re-connecting us with the tangible, the material, engaging all of our senses, as well as re-associating us with our own individual tangibility, embodiment, physical boundaries/containment. They help call us back into our bodies, calm our spinning-out thoughts, anxiety and take us back to the earthy, the sensual. touching and being touched by it! To feel tangible, locatable, able to touch and be touched. Our grounding process brings back to life and re-connects entire dimensions of our humanity - first and foremost our physicality/body/sensuality - that we have abandoned, let atrophy/fade away, become dis-connected from, etc. It’s the road to reviving our souls, feeling fully human again, able to feel, appreciate, savor and be touched by all of life’s precious richness.
Spiritual Crisis/Emergency
In my work, these resources are most frequency used by those in a distinctive form of all-consuming, extremely profound existential crises directly resulting from types of spiritual teachings, practices, experiential shifts, that undermine one’s core conceptual and physical sense of self and reality.
The crisis is distressing enough to impair/impede one’s normal daily functioning as a self-responsible individual, within relationships, as well as carrying out societal roles. The distressing, disorienting and dysfunction-inducing symptoms are all-consuming in that they are consistently the central focus of one’s attention, and it’s extremely difficult to focus on anything else.
NOT JUST NEO-ADVAITA Rabbitholes” & More - this is a good thing to include where you introduce the sensory grounding wing of the bird - and where you explain you support more than neo-advaita experiencers - that it's a wider umbrella - where you even define NEO? Less people come from traditional, more from NEO
While these grounding resources are for any kind of disassociative (disembodying, de-personalizing, de-realizing) spiritual crisis, I am particularly focused on supporting those going through a very distinctive type of spiritual emergency, which many people refer to as a “neo-advaita rabbithole.” Though this term is specific to neo-advaita (contemporary versions of Advaita Vedanta) being the source of the symptoms, most of the symptoms overlap with SE’s triggered by all forms of self & world denying (or illusorizing) non-dual teachings, practices, and shifts - all based on the no-self or “true self” doctrine - in all cases the self is reduced to an impersonal amorphous X (referred to in varying ways). This includes branches of Buddhism (often Tibetan & Zen Buddhism, including things like Vipassana meditation, “pointing out” practices like Dzogchen, self-inquiry (Hindu), etc. What’s shared is that they all have elements that often lead to dissociative, dis-embodying, de-personalizing experience.
More of the main distinctive features and topics that have to be addressed in the process
Unique/distinctive features of self-negation rabbithole/SE (that deserves it's own dedicated approach) that only someone who has gone through it can relate to, and anyone who is going to support it needs to understand the staggering dis-orientation of it, the kind of thoughts running through their head, specific questions, fears, doubts, conundrums - specific kind of existential conundrum etc. the language -verbiage/the rhetoric/ontological assumptions- the teaching/community dynamics, all of which contributed to it, and need to eventually be processed, understood for why they're unhealthy/damaging and validated that this is the case, and there are many themes/elements to go through - authoritarianism, cult-dynamics, spiritual abuse, fallacies in the philosophy/ontology, the practices themselves like unpacking direct pointers and unraveling the reductionist metaphysics/ontology/assumptions about the nature of self and reality, essentially deflating the sense that the teachings reveal the ultimate, unquestionable, self-evident truth.
The Neo Rabbithole is a distinct form of SE, known for its nuanced, distinct kind of (qualities) isolating, dissociative maddening qualities
HIGHLY DISCTINCTIVE to this SE = ORWELLIAN INVERSIONS
DISOCCIATIVE STATES ARE THE IDEALS/ ACTUAL GOAL OF NEO/ULTIMATE TRUTH + PATHOLOGIZING WHAT IS GROUNDING - THE RHETORIC WORKS AGAINST GROUNDING PROCESS NEEDED TO RECOVER
ORWELLIAN INVERSIONS of sanity and insanity, health and unhealth (read more further down) - this is not common to other SE's...
A maddening kind of feeling that one is or is going insane, while potentially cycling through also feeling they are sane and everyone else is insane….both harrowing and part of the Orwellian inversion nightmare is that neo inverts sanity with insanity - they present delusion as sober-minded clear seeing
Neo pathologizes embodiment, association, personalization, individuation, etc. - so what is considered healthy from a grounded humanistic holisitic, psychological perspective which is re-assocation, embodiment etc. is going to seem actually pathological and at least “spiritually” unhealthy to the rabbithole experiencer!!!