Writing:
A Note on Language and Frameworks: Nonduality without the Nonsense
Being and Becoming
Being refers to what doesn’t change—Awareness itself, the field in which all experience arises. I often use Awareness (capitalized) and Being interchangeably. Both point to the same thing, which isn’t actually a thing at all. Awareness has no qualities, no location, no beginning or end. It’s paradoxical: empty and full, nothing and everything. The moment you try to make it an object of study, you’re already sunk.
Becoming refers to the world of change: personality, history, trauma, nervous system states, patterns, and development over time.
When I use Self (capitalized), I’m referring to Being and Becoming integrated—the whole system. Self is different from ego, or self-concept, or parts (lowercase), which are the adaptive strategies, younger aspects, and protective patterns we all carry.
From my perspective, psychology has focused primarily on Becoming. Spiritual traditions often orient toward Being. Each does something essential—and each tends to mistrust or dismiss the other.
Much of my work lives in the tension between these perspectives. These writings are an attempt to speak both languages at once, without collapsing one into the other.
A Promise About Language
I promise to do my best to avoid spiritual gobbledygook—language that sounds profound but doesn’t actually help. Where possible, I ground ideas in lived experience. Where precision breaks down, I’ll name that rather than pretend certainty exists where it doesn’t.
If a term starts to feel like something you’re supposed to understand rather than something you can actually work with, we’ve probably lost the thread.
You’re not meant to memorize these ideas. It’s my hope that you’ll recognize the truth contained in them.
Attachment Theory
I’ve always loved language, and irony, and find it endlessly amusing that the third noble truth says, ‘the way out of suffering involves freeing...
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Why ‘Oneness’ is not codependence
In contemporary Western life, it’s pretty safe to say that it can be hard to figure out what is ‘ours’, vs. what is ‘someone...
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Neither Journey Nor Destination
“Actually, all paths lead away from the truth…How’s that? All paths. There’s no such thing as a path to the truth. The truth’s already...
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Understanding Exiles and Protectors
IFS, created by Richard Schwartz, is often called ‘parts work.’ I knew from listening to interviews with Schwartz that he acknowledged IFS as a...
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Pathwork & Daily Review practice
By the point I arrived at Pathwork, a year or so past the Kundalini awakening, I’d already had years of ‘on the job’...
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Utilizing a Chain Analysis
By the time I came to Polyvagal theory, 10 + years into practicing, it made perfect sense to me, and fit like a...
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Order-of-Operations Delusions If Then Suffering
Order of operations is a rule indicating the correct sequence of steps for evaluating a math expression. Because this phrase works so well as...
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Neuroception How We Process Information
Our systems take in an unbelievable amount of stimuli all the time, the majority of which we aren’t able to consciously catch or process....
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The Issue of Clock Time
One of the biggest obstacles to clear seeing in the present moment is deceptively simple: everything feels like it’s happening everywhere all at once.
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