Joan Tollifson

Joan Tollifson is an author who writes from a nondual spiritual perspective. Her books are about seeing through the imaginary problems created by conceptual thought, and about discovering the aliveness, openness and immediacy of here and now. She has written five: Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life; Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is; Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogs about Nonduality; Nothing to Grasp; and Death: The End of Self-Improvement.

Across them she explores identity, free will, addiction, suffering, transformation, awareness and the nature of experience. She encourages readers to investigate directly rather than hold onto beliefs or second-hand ideas. Her work invites the discovery that body, mind and world form an undivided, ever-changing whole with no inside or outside. The exploration she points to is direct, non-methodical, awareness-based and not result-oriented.

The books differ in form. Bare-Bones Meditation is a spiritual memoir centered on her work with Toni Packer, her main teacher, and also covers her first Zen teacher and her later discovery of Advaita. Painting the Sidewalk with Water gathers talks and dialogs from public meetings in the early 2000s. Nothing to Grasp is a concise statement of her essential message. Death: The End of Self-Improvement, her most recent, weaves nonduality together with aging, dying and going through cancer.

She says she writes from her own direct experience and insight, informed by Buddhism, Advaita, Christianity, Sufism, radical nonduality and nontraditional inquiry. Readers have mentioned the honesty, clarity and humor in her writing. She also publishes regular articles on Substack, along with news of videos, podcasts and books.