Dread Attacks and Nondual Therapy

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A dark wind blows over and through the energetic substance of the separate self. We call it dread, and navigating it without resistance is a whole biochemical science in the art in Nondual Therapy.

Those who have undergone a spiritual awakening often experience sudden attacks of formless dread. This happens because the greater degree of surrender means that many forms that were held in stasis become free - and their suffering content becomes formless and vulnerable.

Dread is the proper energy of creepers-jeepers, hassling the solar-plexus, robbing the body of breath, tormenting the areas where we are still hooked in personality, tickling the little issues that have deadly roots in trauma-based inhibition. As such, it brings the energy of dissociation and shock, and can widen the rifts in the psyche where information is not free to flow. 

At first, dread can feel like anxiety or panic. Later it becomes apparent that it has no context, no inner causality. It's arising out of the energies in the environment, sometimes channeled by the agendas of others to evade their own sense of worthlessness or guilt. It feels rotten, estranging, and exhausting. At the basis it resonates with unresolved atmospheres of our own, private dark night of the soul - the realm of formless core fears, or existential angst.

Paradoxically, recent research has shown that the pain medication Tylenol can inhibit the brain signal that something is wrong - making it a prime candidate for the treatment of existential angst. Yet from our point of view, the treatment of uncomfortable experience through the numbing of a whole field of experience - by reducing psychic sensitivity - is a poor treatment of the deeper Nondual wisdom of the soul. It robs us of the existential crisis that can birth the realization of that which can never be threatened, damaged or wounded - the dimension of ourselves that lives beyond all fear (see: And Fear Shall Have No Dominion)

In Nondual Therapy, we learn the quality of discernment, which is the ability to be able to energetically trace and find the origin of energies of fear and anger. Knowing the cause makes managing the effect so much easily. The dread is no longer personal. Although we suffer it, we no longer believe it to be true. It is akin to walking through a cloud of carbon monoxide and suffering the fumes, without believing that you are the source of the poison, or that you did something to deserve it.

This dread can be sensed by all species of life. It is the human conceptualization of future horror – a debilitating blend of fear and anger, formlessly threatening the unspeakable - that thing which must never happen (but no-one can remember what that is). Like an acid-based indicator, it shows us where we are not free within ourselves, awakening the dormant fear or pain in and around psychological contractions.

The covert agenda of dread is control - to reinvest the mind with the belief that it should control and distrust the naturalness of the whole. It's threat of shame, blame and exclusion has been used on UFO witnesses, meditators, paranormal enthusiasts, women, social upstarts and any form of divergent for centuries, as a way to invalidate and dictate form. 

If we ignore this temptation to believe in the autocracy "Georgi Y. Johnson" (fill in your name) as an actual, real thing, that needs to be defended, then the expansion to experiential spaces beyond the low murmur of dread is possible. Anything in us that could be threatened, is not who we truly are. When we fight for what we are not, we get entangled in illusion.

When the suffering of dread arises, it can serve as a scan to show us where we are still contracted, where we still deny aspects of experience, or where we lose our freedom. This is true whether the dread is generating internally or is channeled towards us by another person.

Many have advised methods to "protect" ourselves against bad energies. Yet much of this is futile. In allowing ourselves to be emptied out completely by energetic attack, without entanglement, we allow a process of purification and emptiness itself to become a lived experience of zero-distance fulfillment and freedom.

Zero distance is an effect of unconditioned awareness. Just as awareness becomes unbounded, stretching into infinity, it is revealed as also unobstructed. With pure awareness, we are able to pass the split of subject and object inherent to perception and ‘become’ that which is perceived, without being possessed by it. Dread thrives in the rift between subject and object. When we are utterly able to allow experience at zero distance, dread dissipates.

Having said this, we live in what can be experienced as dreadful times, and it’s not always possible to move out of the paradigm of time, space and fear.

3 Dread Attack Protocols

We see the effects of dread in the field when we find ourselves with bent head, hidden face, crossing our legs, wrapping our arms over the solar plexus. When the experience of dread in the field becomes uncontainable, it can be a support to:

1. Rest in mindful breathing (breathe in the freshness of the Now, and breathe out the sense of dread).

Notice that the experience of dread is never there on the in-breath.

Notice also that breathing is a barometer of the amount of psychological stress running through the system. We momentarily stop breathing or our breath becomes shallow when a contraction emerges.

2. Find rhythm.

It can be through listening to music; tapping the fingers or feet; or squeezing a part of the body rhythmically. Dread gets its power in the field of illusion out of real time and space, and it threatens us primarily through its sinister lack of form. When we use rhythm, we structure the energetic field in the here and now. Dread cannot be sustained in this.

3. Become empty.

Release all agenda to do anything about whatever the dread is suggesting is wrong. Connect from the existential emptiness in ourselves to the emptiness in the other. The human organism is an open channel.

If we let it, any energy entering us can just as easily exit to the universe through the back door of the psyche.

Part of the client’s process can be reflected through undercurrents of thought appearing in the therapist’s head. For example: “I am special; Everyone hates me; I want to kill myself.”

The degree to which this bothers us directly reflects latent patterns of identification and brings opportunities to disinvest from the thinking mind and to invite somatic contractions to relax. The dread thread can give us access to our clients deeper fears, and also the means to connect energetically from a quality layer - unconditionally to all the spooky stuff.

For example, we might feel their dread which is the unconscious fear of exposure, and use it to connect with and invite the essence of the client. When the dread is targeted at us, for example, the response can be something like: "I am so sorry that you are suffering this." (hate, envy, fear, rage etc). The movement invites the quality of compassion from the essence of the client, firstly toward themselves.

Everywhere that we suffer in the therapeutic process is an invitation to wider expansion and deeper liberation through the soft dissolution of contractions in our True Nature. As therapists, we have agreed to lift the veils of denial and to allow suffering. This allowance of suffering depends on our unfiltered awareness.

When we stay as pure awareness, the organic movements of contraction, expansion and contraction are liberated. We are free to focus, concentrate, or to broaden all horizons without the need to dictate from the mind, or to believe in the reactivity of the nerve system. In allowing suffering, suffering loses its tyranny over the process, and like a forsaken child, it begins to come home to the wounded spaces out of which it was born.