Announcing a new and important book from Non-Duality Press:
The Sun Rises in the Evening: Beyond addiction and limited recovery to embracing wholeness
by Gary Nixon PhD
I’m going to write a review of this book and hopefully interview Gary, but for now I want to announce the publication of the book, which is today. I feel it’s an important book because Gary is the central force behind not only a nonduality community in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, but an academic community as well. He is an associate professor at the University of Lethbridge where he directs the addictions counseling program. I think it’s always significant when nonduality meets academia.
The following is from the book’s promotional material:
In The Sun Rises in the Evening: Beyond addiction and limited recovery to embracing wholeness, Gary Nixon PhD gives us a specific framework for dealing with recovery from addiction, focusing on the issues that arise after the first stages of recovery.
What is remarkable, and most helpful, is that Gary doesn’t spare himself – we learn that he has made the journey that he is inviting us to share, from the time when he shouted out in a session ‘I want to be number one!’ through all his attachments to being the best ever at being enlightened, via an abyss of despair, to a place where… and here we can best quote Gary himself: “There is no longer any special status to claim, and all of life is embraced in a friendly way. We are not the special one, just a friendly being in existence, living in the vast suchness of existence, open and vulnerable to life. But now we are free to bring our joy and passion into the world.”
Is this a book about recovery from addiction? Yes, it is – but it’s more and that ‘more’ applies to most of us who have an undefinable sense that we have not quite embraced the wholeness for which we claim to be seeking.
About the author: Gary Nixon is Director of the Addictions Counselling Program at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, where he is an Associate Professor. At age twenty-three and qualified in law, he felt a call to make the transformational journey his career path and completed a Masters and a Doctorate in psychology with a focus on the integration of Western transpersonal psychology and Eastern contemplative traditions.
He pursued ‘spiritual enlightenment’ with the same vigour and dedication that he gave to his academic career, only to find that intense striving and seeking for spiritual success brought him to a place of ‘absolute hopelessness and total failurehood.’ Thus it was he came to understand that in seeking a spiritual goal he was merely reinforcing the illusion of a narcissistic separate self. Now that he is no longer ‘special’, he has come to rest naturally in being – friendly with all existence. Gary enjoys a celebratory ordinariness of the days living with his wife Marcia and going for daily long runs in the coulees.
He maintains a private nondual psychotherapy practice working with individuals and groups – this complements the passionate legacy of his published academic work and his editorship of Paradoxica: Journal of Nondual Psychology. He hosts the annual Paradoxica Nondual Psychology Conference.
~ ~ ~
Amazon.com link:
