One of the unique aspects of my Non-dual flavored offerings is my openness to welcome whatever arises for people, especially related to one's core contractions and wounds, both before and after spiritual awakening. Part of this openness comes from my own background in psychology, but a large part of it stems from having met with hundreds of people over the years, many who have had powerful awakening experiences, and discovering that many of these people continue to deal with issues related to their upbringing, past conditioning, and traumas.

So rather than simply pointing out the core misunderstandings that are at the root of all our psychological suffering, I've recognized that it’s also very useful to give Space, time and unconditional Love to the wounded parts of ourselves, and that doing so is how these parts can fully heal and be let go of. Although Clarity and Insight will always be helpful in moving beyond our suffering and conditioning, bringing simple Compassion, Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness to all parts of our individual self is also needed in order to heal from our past wounds, and to more deeply embody and integrate our spiritual realizations into our everyday lives and relationships.

As our spiritual experience deepens and reveals more nuanced levels of Wholeness, we recognize that our individual self is nothing more than a collective composite of conditioned perspectives and emotions, core beliefs, and energetic paradigms. We also recognize that our individual healing is also simultaneously a healing for the entire collective human consciousness (feel free to substitute the word 'self' with 'body', as the body will continue to be here even after the self has fallen away). From this vantage point, not only is loving and healing our individual self and body necessary for our own evolution and freedom, it also turns out to be the highest service that we can offer the rest of humanity. 

The spiritual teacher Adyashanti beautifully shares the essence of this perspective when he said “The biggest embrace of love you’ll ever make is to embrace yourself completely. Then you’ll realize you’ve just embraced the whole universe, and everything and everybody in it”. Rumi shares this perspective another way by saying “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”. The Buddha recognized this perspective in his own way when he said “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection”. And of course it's easy to see how Christ’s entire life and teaching could simply be summed up by his invitation to “Love each other, as I have loved you”.

The premise of this course is built upon recognizing Self-Love in this way, and ultimately invites you to see that waking up and staying awake is not only the greatest act of self-love that we can give to ourselves, it's also the greatest Service and Love that we can offer the rest of the world. Because the essence of our True Nature is Love, the only thing that separates self-love from Self-Love is our perception of our own sense of self, and our connection to all things.