The Science and Nonduality (SAND) Conference is now in its third year. This year it was held at the Embassy Suites hotel in San Rafael, California, from Oct 19-24, 2011.
NWPI collaborated with SAND this year with the following presentation, On October 22:
“Discovering a Timeless Spaciousness in Psychotherapy”
Presenters: John J. Prendergast, Ph.D. & Kaisa Puhakka, Ph.D.
Length and form: 90 minutes - talk and dialogue
Offered by: the Nondual Wisdom and Psychology Institute (NWPI)
Description: Most clients entering psychotherapy, as well as most psychotherapists, identify with a narrative that binds themselves in time and space. This presentation will explore how this binding narrative may deconstruct in the field of open presence, leaving both client and therapist resting in what subjectively feels like a timeless spaciousness.
Themes that will be explored include:
1) That the experience of timelessness corresponds with spacious awareness.
2) How discovery of our timeless and spacious nature arises spontaneously out of nondual awareness; that it is not a technique. Presence evokes itself.
3) That timeless awareness is always available regardless of the content of a session and that certain moments of non-directional silence can lend themselves as experiential portals to contact this awareness.
4) That refined attunement to or resonance with present experience is a portal.
5) That investigation of the truth of any belief and the resting in not-knowing is a portal.
6) That time and the timeless are ultimately undivided or nondual.
7) The different motives and capacities that clients bring to therapy in contrast to what students may bring to their spiritual teachers.
