Everything IFS Blog

A free reflection on Chapter Twenty of the Ashtavakra Gita, The Final Freedom, the closing chapter of the whole dialogue, read through Internal Family Systems (IFS). Explore the king's final dissolution of body, mind, teaching, and even the "I" that had been speaking, into the bodiless freedom (videhamukti) where the dialogue trails off into silence, and how IFS distinguishes the genuine Self that holds every part with room to spare from a part that uses the language of no-se

A free reflection on Chapter Nineteen of the Ashtavakra Gita, Resting in One's Own Majesty, read through Internal Family Systems (IFS). Explore the king's exultant sweep through every pair of opposites, the tweezers of knowledge drawing out the last thorn of thought, his amazed "where is it now?" from the throne of his own being (svamahima), and how IFS distinguishes a genuine spaciousness in which the old troubles have lost their grip from a part that prematurely declares th

Liberation in Life: Living It All, Bound by None of It (Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter Eighteen) 6 min read In chapter seventeen Ashtavakra had held up the still portrait of the true knower, complete enough to stand alone with no loneliness in it. Now that motionless figure begins to move and live. Eighteen is the longest chapter in the whole dialogue by far, a hundred verses that do not so much teach a new thing as let the entire realization pour out at once, image after image of