The Reframe Trap

The mind seeks calmness through ever more stable patterns of perception. This impulse led to the development of mental reframing. The concept of reframing has ancient roots in Stoic and existential thought, but it was first formalised in psychotherapy during the 1970s by the Palo Alto group of family therapists, including Virginia Satir, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch at the Mental Research Institute. Their 1974 book Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution introduced reframing as the deliberate shifting of perspective to alter the meaning of experience. Around the same time, Richard Bandler and John Grinder integrated the idea into Neuro-Linguistic Programming, popularising it in the wider therapeutic and self-help fields. Since then, reframing has become a standard technique within cognitive and behavioural therapies under the broader term “cognitive restructuring”.

The power of reframing reveals a built-in intelligence of the mind, which it then applies to the message of nonduality, subsuming that message into its agenda of remaining calm. Calmness is perhaps the best it can hope for, for it cannot comprehend the wholeness of simply being, the unknowable, essential aliveness of what is and is everything. The mind fundamentally reifies all it touches so it can achieve stability, creating elevated selves out of words such as awareness, consciousness and beingness, but they remain selves nonetheless.

However this nondual message is communicated, there are subtle mental traps into which the listener can fall. If the teaching, as in many Advaitin traditions, introduces the idea of “consciousness” or “awareness”, the mind can become trapped in the subtle witness position, as if that were a separate identity. This reduces the mind to a calm state where nothing really matters. It says, “Ah, I get it — I am what is before appearances. Appearances are just temporary forms of me and not what is real. My peace is remembering that I am the contentless observer.” But in that moment, there is still someone holding an idea about being the contentless observer, the witness. That “someone” is the same sense of separation the phrase was pointing beyond. So the belief “there is no separation” can, paradoxically, become another form of separation, because it is owned.

If the teaching rejects awareness altogether and speaks of an unknowable isness that is everything, appearing as a universe to no one, and all perceptions are simply appearances of this — not about a separate subject knowing a separate object, not even about an “I” that knows it is — the trap remains possible. For many seekers, “everything is already this” becomes an idea adopted by the mind to manage the discomfort of searching. It functions as a comforting conclusion, a way to feel as though understanding has been reached. The mind takes the phrase and subtly uses it to reinforce itself: “Ah, I get it — there’s no separation, it’s all one. I’ll rest in that knowing.” But in that moment, there is still someone holding an idea about oneness. That “someone” is the same sense of separation the phrase was pointing beyond. So the belief “there is no separation” can, paradoxically, become another form of separation, because it is owned.

The mind’s way of keeping safe is to create the concept of knowing and then crown itself as the knower. The mind, programmed to survive at all costs, simply reframes the nondual message to preserve its security blanket of reified concepts and maintain the belief in an illusory self. When the illusion of separation no longer appears, there is no conclusion left, not even the idea that “all is one”. There is just what is: ungraspable, alive and causeless. It is not known or believed; it is the absence of the knower entirely. In that absence, the statement “everything is already this” is not a thought or a reframe, it is simply self-evident, like the warmth of sunlight. No one holds it. No one applies it. It is not a reframe because there is no mind left to frame anything. Where ordinary reframing changes the story, nonduality ends the storyteller. What remains is what has always been: this simple, radiant being, here and now. A mind that is open to admitting the ever-present, never-changing, non-objectifiable aliveness as the ground of all that appears is more willing not to attempt to claim it knows it, owns it or reframes it, but instead to bow down to the reality of it.

With love,

Freyja