Listening from the Heart of Silence

Listening from the Heart of Silence: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, Volume 2 is a companion volume to The Sacred Mirror. It expands and deepens the groundbreaking dialogue begun in The Sacred Mirror.

The title Listening from the Heart of Silence refers to a quality of listening that originates prior to the duality of the one who listens and the one who is heard. It is a listening that is global, spacious, and paradoxically (to the mind at least), extremely intimate. It comes from and points to our homeground in silent, lucid openness - what some have called the Heart. When we listen from this heart of silence, we invite healing on the deepest level, welcoming everything just as it is. This is as true in our ordinary relationships as it is in the specialized relationship between therapist and client. Once the heart of silence is fully recognized, our lives begin to move from the inside out with greater honesty, love, spontaneity and power, radiating out like concentric circles on the surface of a pond. Our lives increasingly embody our deepest truth.

All psychological suffering is ultimately rooted in the misunderstanding of who we really are. The vital current of nondual wisdom implicit in the world's great spiritual traditions directly addresses the origins of the profound sense of lack and separation that are the basis of human suffering.

John J. Prendergast, Ph.D., is an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he has created and taught a class on Transpersonal Counseling Skills for over a decade. He is the author of "The Chakras in Transpersonal Psychotherapy" in the International Journal of Yoga Therapy (2000), and co-author (with Krystal, S., Krystal, P., Fenner, P., and Shapiro, I. and K.) of "Transpersonal Psychology, Eastern Philosophy and EMDR", in Shapiro, F. (ed) EMDR As An Integrative Psychotherapy Approach: Experts of Diverse Orientations Explore the Paradigm Prism, American Psychological Association Books (2002). He has taught a number of workshops for therapists on "The Energybody in Psychotherapy" and "Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychotherapy: Presence, Resonance and Inquiry," and co-organized and presented at the Conferences on Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy. He has been in private practice since 1985. He began Transcendental Meditation in 1970 and later taught it; traveled to India on three occasions to be with various teachers including Ammachi, and spent fifteen years with his primary teacher Jean Klein, a European sage who synthesized elements of Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism. He currently studies with Adyashanti.