Hi Alessa

I didn’t really notice the differences between the spiritual and therapeutic paths until the notion of detachment from ego or dissolving of self was being experienced as discounting someone’s suffering and even triggering which was never the intent. So I sat with the tension I felt and did a little research to try to discover why I was senses this disconnect.

The Therapeutic Path: is one most people do their ‘work’ where the self is treated as an object, something that can be observed, understood, healed, and integrated.
• the self here is a construct made of language, memories, patterns, roles, and wounds.
• The therapist and client explore this object together: its history, its defenses, its needs.
• The goal is often to strengthen or stabilize the self, to make it coherent, resilient, and functional.

When on the Therapeutic Path the focus is on healing, integration, and psychological well-being with the goal of reducing suffering, increase resilience, and foster a coherent sense of self. All good things!
• Practices: Talk therapy, somatic work, trauma healing, shadow work
• Orientation: Ego-strengthening — helps the self become more whole and functional
• Key Feature: It works within the self-system to resolve wounds and build capacity

The Spiritual or Contemplative Path: the self is not a fixed object but a rhythm… a flowing, impermanent pattern of arising and dissolving.
• It’s seen as ephemeral, like breath or waves, appearing in awareness, then fading.
• The focus is not on fixing the self, but on witnessing its movements without grasping.
• The rhythm includes thoughts, sensations, identities… all dancing in and out of view.

When on the Contemplative Path the focus is on awareness, presence, insight and relationship with the sacred, the divine, or ultimate meaning. The experience being Direct experience of reality, often beyond conceptual thought and union, surrender, transformation, or alignment with a higher reality… Contemplation listens deeply, not to control the melody, but to realize the silence beneath it.
• Practices: Meditation, mindfulness, silence, self-inquiry, koans, centering prayer.
• Orientation: Non-dual or transpersonal… seeks to dissolve the ego or see through it.
• Key Feature: It’s not about fixing the self, but seeing through the illusion of self.
(note the conversation where we ask not to be fixed)

As I mentioned in Mirror thread it can be disorientating when your in conversation with someone who defines the words your trying to point past… and you don’t quite notice that’s what happening. You leave the conversation wondering if you been heard and frustrated which might even feel like boundaries weren’t respected… This happens quite a bit on forums…

Naming this ‘gap’ between Therapeutic and what I’m calling the Contemplative Path i hope to point out the “different parts of the journey” but are not always noticed when communication moves from one to the other. The experience of the movement from one to the other is to me is as if two people assuming they are speaking the same language and are puzzled because they are unable to understand one another.

In the posts above I noted Jung’s thought that ‘it takes a healthy self/ego to let it’s self/ego’ The Therapeutic part of the path works on the healthy sense of self, lets call it living out of the heart charka, and then when the work is done, transition to the Contemplative path to experience the other charkas… Confusing the two part of a paths in dialog I find really disorienting…

Why I think this matters: (Sorry this goes back to the conversation with my in-law I pointed to in Mirrors posts and something I’ve been wrestling with so I’m going to transition to the Christian language that I inherited. I know I can be confusing.)

In the Christian traditions I was brought up, the cross was taught as a fixed event, as a historical object. I was thought that Jesus died so that we wouldn’t have to. A teaching that did not serve me well.

As a fixed event the self is spared, preserved, even protected from death. The focus is on belief in the event, not participation in the pattern aligning with the view that the self is something to be saved, healed, or made whole but not surrendered.

This I observed can lead to two distortions:
• Rejection of the cross: “Why should I suffer if Jesus already did?” and or
• Clinging to the cross: “I must stay in suffering to be faithful.”
Both miss what I’ve experienced as the deeper rhythm.

For me the contemplative path reframes the cross not as a static object, but as a dynamic rhythm where the birth-death-resurrection cycle is present in every breath, every letting go, every transformation. Here the self arises, dissolves, and is reborn moment by moment. As a rhythm the cross is not a place to stay, but a passage to move through, resurrection not a reward, but the natural unfolding of surrender where “Take up your cross daily” becomes not a burden, but a rhythm: inhale (birth), pause (death), exhale (resurrection)… the sound of OUM… “prayer without ceasing”…

You’ve seen how first teaching can freeze the cross into a fixed point and how that can cause people to either reject it or cling to it. But the contemplative insight invites a third way, when the self is healthy/ready. The cross becomes not a transaction to believe in, but a rhythm to participate in. The self is no longer a something that avoids dying, but something that dies and rises continually with each breath…

This joins the paths where:
• Therapy helps us face the wounds that make us fear the cross (the dying of ego small-s self)
• Contemplation helps us see that we are not the one who dies, but the space in which dying and rising happen.
• Spirituality becomes the art of trusting that rhythm, even as and when it breaks us open…

Hi Everyone,

As I’ve been exploring different ways to communicate, I’ve discovered that what I think I’m saying isn’t always what others are hearing. Sometimes what felt clear to me wasn’t, and the gap between intention and impact was felt as triggering or even harmful. If I’m honest, my first reaction is often to explain or defend—something I’ve learned isn’t always skillful. 🙂

It’s uncomfortable, for sure. But I’ve learned a lot through these moments, especially by trying to understand how my words were received. For that, I want to thank everyone.

My experience here has been positive, even when I’ve been called out or left feeling unsettled. From what I’ve seen, we all come from the same place: wanting to help and wanting to be seen. I hope we can continue our dialogue from that space.

I’ve also come to see that not all conflict needs resolution. As Lewis B. Smedes wrote in The Art of Forgiveness, sometimes forgiveness is more about releasing the need to fix than finding agreement.

Because I’m me 🙂 a quote from Julius Lester who said, “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart, and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.“

Hi Everyone I wanted to name something I’ve been sitting with.

In this conversation around the middle way and the dissolving of self, I sense a tension, that’s not disagreement, but perhaps a difference in how we’re approaching suffering.

Some responses seem to come from a therapeutic frame, where the self is the one who suffers and must be protected and healed. That makes sense, especially when pain is raw and personal.

My reflections, and I think James, come from a spiritual contemplative frame, where the self is seen less as a fixed entity and more as a pattern, a rhythm that can soften, loosen, even dissolve, without denying the reality of suffering.

I realize now that speaking from that frame may have landed as bypassing or erasing the one who suffers. That wasn’t my intention, and I don’t believe it’s the intention of any of the wisdom tradition. Though this confusion often arises, especially when language brushes up against pain.

As the Buddha indicated, I don’t experience the dissolving of self as the end of suffering, but as the end of identifying with it. Jung put it simply: when we no longer identify with our pain, the small-s self dissolves (loosens), and something deeper, the capital-S Self, is revealed. How someone relates to that capital-S Self is personal and not easily communicated so should also be handled with care.

I’m hoping naming this tension might help bridge the gap between the therapeutic frame and contemplative (spiritual) frame and any misunderstandings that have arisen.

It occured to me I may have confused things with the last notion where the seeker becomes the sought.

I was imagining that in the sense that “what you seek is also seeking you”

In Sufism, this is viewed as seeker longing for union with the Divine, often called the Beloved. The path is one of love, devotion, and surrender. But the deeper realization is that the seeker and the Beloved were never separate. The search itself dissolves, and what remains is the recognition that the seeker is the sought.

As Rumi writes: “You wander from room to room hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck.”

So, becoming the sought means awakening to the truth that what you were looking for was never outside you, it was your own essence all along. We return were we started – “we were never born and we never die” – “It is just What We Truly are”

Hi James

I feel we’re describing the same landscape, just from different elevations. You’re speaking from the summit, the view where even the observer dissolves, and thoughts arise and fall within the Unnamable. I’m describing the descent, the moment when the “I” returns through the doorway of thought and language.

I don’t view the return as a failure, but part of the rhythm of being human. The clarity of total disappearance is real and so is the reappearance of identity.

“It is nothing other than what We truly are”. – Life as it is.

Hi Everyone

Alessa – yes, I feel James is saying the same thing, or at least we land in the same place: “nothing is born and nothing dies.”

I was drawn to Anita’s question about whether such a nondual space is soothing, and also to the role language plays in shaping our experience. Many who encounter this kind of dissolution report a loss of inner dialogue, a kind of wordless presence, or even the absence of presence itself.

In such a state, the question of soothing fades. One is neither soothed nor not soothed. The image that comes to mind is climbing a mountain and arriving at the summit, where everything is clear. But Life has one demand, that it be lived. We are not allowed to stay, the summit may be clear, but Life asks us to descend.

James – I hear you when you say body and mind work perfectly without a “me” function. And I agree: identification with the body as person inevitably creates suffering. What I’m exploring is how language itself, not just thought, gives rise to the illusion of self. Language doesn’t just describe the “me”; it builds it. Without language, there is no scaffolding to hold the illusion together.

This was something I experienced when waking after a surgery. I was ‘aware’ of ‘being’ without any sense of I, until a question was thought… who or what was aware… where was the I… Immediately I was pulled into consciousness, building my ‘self’ with all the labels… all the while a second thought – Noooooooooo.

That moment of self-return was like a ripple on a still pond. It marked the transition from unstructured awareness into the architecture of identity. The thought itself was not just a question; it was a summoning. It called forth the scaffolding of “I”… the labels, the history, the body, all the familiar furniture of self.

This mirrors creation stories where the world begins with a word:
– In Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word…”
– In Hindu cosmology: “Aum” is the primordial vibration – waking, dreaming, unconscious, silence – waking, dreaming, unconscious, silence….
– In Buddhist thought: the arising of nama-rupa (name and form) marks the beginning of duality.

That experience of being pulled back by a single thought, slowed down perhaps by that anesthesia, is perhaps one that occurs on each waking… felt like the seed of separation, the moment the mirror turns and reflects a “me.” And I wonder if the inner Nooooooo was the soul’s recognition of the cost: the return to form, to story, to suffering. Yet even this return is sacred as It’s what allows us to walk, speak, love, and create.

So, when we return from that summit, from the clarity of total disappearance… does the experience soothe?

My observation, sometimes yes, sometimes no. No, when it’s mistaken as a goal or a possession. Yes, when it loosens the grip of identity and teaches us to hold words, and selves, desires… more lightly. At least that has been my experience.