About Freyja

I am a writer, educator and emotional wellbeing practitioner, and the creator of Naturally Appearing. My work explores non-duality alongside the richness and complexity of ordinary human life through writing, dialogue, reflective conversation and creative inquiry.

Around the age of nineteen, I encountered the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin and began what became a lifelong exploration of identity, suffering, perception and the apparent relationship between separation and wholeness. Over the years, this developed into a particular interest in what came to seem increasingly simple: before our explanations about life, there is what naturally seems to appear.

Alongside this contemplative exploration, I spent many years working in psychologically informed and wellbeing-oriented settings, including more than a decade as a Human Givens practitioner. This brought a different but complementary engagement with emotion, perception, trauma, human needs and the ways in which people understand themselves and respond to the circumstances of their lives.

For a long time, the contemplative and psychological aspects of my work seemed quite different. Gradually, however, they came together. Nothing is self-evidently missing from the wholeness of what naturally seems to appear, yet human beings still naturally seem to appear with needs, relationships, difficulties, vulnerabilities and an extraordinary capacity to respond creatively to life.

Alongside this came a profound shift in the ordinary experience of identity and separation. The independently separate self that had previously seemed so obvious could no longer be found, while the wholeness that had apparently been sought seemed never to have been missing.

This was not experienced as acquiring something new or attaining a special state. Life continued as ordinary human life, with its relationships, challenges, pleasures and difficulties, but the implications of this apparent shift continued to unfold through writing, conversation and everyday experience.

Much of my work now centres on a simple form of self-evident pointing. Rather than trying to establish what this ultimately is, attention is given to what naturally seems to appear and what is already self-evident of itself. It is appearing, is not nothing and is fully itself. Nothing is self-evidently missing from it, while an independently separate self is not self-evident within it.

This pointing forms the basis of my book, The Wholeness Of What Naturally Seems To Appear, and is explored through Naturally Appearing, my Naturally Nondual writing on Substack, open dialogue meetings and conversations about wholeness and ordinary human living.

The exploration remains remarkably simple:

What could be more naturally whole than the wholeness of what naturally seems to appear?

Warm wishes,

Freyja