Stillness Speaks Book Previews

Nothing To Grasp: What Is Total Intimacy & Its Gift? Joan Tollifson

by Sanjiv Manifest | May 15, 2025

“… It is total intimacy—no separation … the awareness that beholds it all …” ~ Joan Tollifson

What is total intimacy? …

To answer that let’s step back … and ask another fundamental and inextricably linked question : what does it mean, per nondual teachings, to not take your life personally ? …

It’s easy to misunderstand not take your life personally into some form of detachment from being human or deny your humanness … or losing all of our personality traits or quirks, … or losing our sense of identity and all that stems from such “losing” … and miss the real meaning that its pointing to the inseparability from everything – winds, trees, planets, starts, galaxies …

This inseparability or the sense of no separation is also total intimacy …

So, the post’s opening question might be best answered by exploring Not Taking Your Life Personally: What Does That Mean?

Turns out Joan Tollifson dedicates an entire chapter to this exact question in her recent book Nothing to Grasp (the 2nd edition was released by New Sarum Press on May 4th – originally published in 2012) …

We offer this entire chapter – Part 2 of this series- in which Joan, with her usual exquisitely clear and relatable style, …

… addresses misconceptions about it by clearly stating what not taking life personally doesn’t mean, e.g., “… that you no longer have so-called “boundaries” in a psychological or social sense. It doesn’t mean you lose all your personality traits or all your neurotic quirks. It doesn’t mean you don’t apologize when you hurt someone or make a mistake, or that you don’t still have opinions and preferences, or that you don’t ever set goals or make an effort or care about anything …”

… makes a compelling case for loosening the grip of our self centered narratives by recognizing that everything arises from interdependent causes and conditions by using everyday examples like weather or city boundaries.

For Joan not taking life personally means showing up with full presence, compassion, and clarity, unburdened by the illusion of separateness. And, in this recognition, we find both freedom and deeper intimacy with what is.

Not taking our life personally is just one aspect of the deep unpacking Joan undertakes in her book Nothing to Grasp … which is an engaging and easy read … that is highly recommended.

… in Part 1, we offered an introductory glimpse of the book …

{All italicized text in this post is from Joan’s book and is published here with the publisher New Sarum Press’ generous permission. Scroll to the bottom for a free downloadable Table of Contents. And, you can purchase the book at Amazon.}

Not Taking Your Life Personally: What Does That Mean?

The universe is full of action, but there is no actor. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

When nondual teachings speak of not taking the events of our life personally (not “taking delivery,” as Nisargadatta used to say), or when these teachings say that “the person” is a kind of mirage, this isn’t meant to deny the apparent person in every sense or to suggest that “enlightened people” turn into amorphous blobs of indistinguishable nothingness without feelings or personalities. It doesn’t mean you have to drop your name and go around insisting you are nobody, nor does it mean that if your wife dies, the goal is to be untouched and not “take it personally.”

What is being pointed to is not detachment or insensitivity, but rather, total intimacy, unfiltered sensitivity—the absence of separation—nonduality. Nothing exists independently of everything else, and everything is nothing but ceaseless change. When we are born, this seamless immediacy is obvious, although of course we don’t conceptualize or formulate it in words at that stage of life. But when we are first born, there is simply open aware presence and the undivided happening of the moment—hunger flows into food flows into sleep flows into sounds and shapes and colors and warmth and movement. As far as we are concerned at that stage of life, we have no name, no age, no gender, no race, no nationality, no social class, no purpose, no flaws, no story. We learn all of those things, and we learn to think of ourselves as a separate, persisting individual encapsulated inside a bodymind, somebody apart from this world who was born into this world, somebody who “looks out” at the world and who lives “in” it. But this separation is conceptual. When we look for this “body” or this “mind” or this “person” or “this world,” all we actually find is thorough-going flux and ceaseless change, in which everything is inseparable from everything else.

That undivided, boundless experiencing that the baby has, in which life is perceived as one whole undivided happening, is still here, but in the adult, that experience of unbroken wholeness has been overlaid and to some degree obscured by all the concepts that have been learned and then super-imposed on top of the bare simplicity of present experiencing. We have learned to focus on the map instead of the territory. We overlook what is most intimate, most obvious, most undeniable—our actual present moment experiencing, as it is—and we focus instead on the stories, labels, ideas, beliefs, explanations and abstract categories about it—the conceptual map.

Let’s take an example. “Chicago” is a word, a concept, a label, an object on a map. But to what actual territory does this word refer? We cannot deny that there is something we call Chicago, but when we start to look closely at what exactly this something is, we find that we can’t pin down exactly what “Chicago” is, for it is always in flux, and its borders are, in reality, nonexistent, changing and completely permeable. The sign “Welcome to Chicago” proclaims a legal boundary, but on the ground itself (or in the air), you don’t actually find any separation between Chicago and the city next to it. The earth itself is a continuous, undivided process, as is the air. The lake that borders Chicago on one side moves in and out with the tides and the waves, making it utterly impossible to pin down an actual place where Chicago ends and Lake Michigan begins. Only on the map does Chicago look like a solid, clearly delineated object. But in reality, it is nothing but unbounded, ceaseless change. We can’t deny Chicago, but we can’t really get hold of it either.

We can’t deny that Chicago has a unique and distinct personality, a flavor entirely different from San Francisco, London, Bombay or any other city. But again, we can’t pin down exactly what that personality is, for it, too, is always changing and showing different faces of itself. Different people see it differently. If you’re in Chicago, or more accurately, if Chicago shows up Here / Now, this happening called Chicago has an undeniable reality—smells, sounds, textures, colors, shapes, movements—but all of this is a fleeting appearance that cannot be grasped or held onto. It has no inherent, substantial, persisting, objective reality. Even the buildings that seem so solid are slowly decomposing.

And what about the weather? We don’t take the weather in Chicago personally—we don’t blame the city for having a cloudy day. We don’t feel the city clouded up deliberately through an act of independent free will, that it was “out to get us,” or that it “wasn’t trying hard enough” to be sunny. Instead, we recognize that a cloudy day is the result of innumerable causes and conditions that have no owner, no author, no actor.

Likewise, we cannot deny that there is someone we call Joan who has a unique personality. But we can’t get hold of exactly what this “Joan” is, or where exactly she begins and ends, or what exactly her personality is, for all of this is changing and moving and inseparable from everything else in the universe that is supposedly “not Joan.” If we really see the seamlessness and interbeing of everything, and the way it is all an ever-changing appearance, then we realize that there is no independent executive at the helm inside Joan who chooses her cloudy weather anymore than there is any such entity inside the city of Chicago. We don’t blame Joan for being the way she is, nor do we waste time trying to turn her into somebody else, just as we wouldn’t try to turn Chicago into Los Angeles. We recognize that the unique weather patterns we call “Joan” are the result of innumerable causes and conditions.

It is in that sense that we speak of not taking our weather personally and that we talk about the separate person being nothing but a mirage. But we don’t deny that there is something here that we call Joan or that she has a distinct personality. We also would not deny that this organism called Joan can apparently open and close her hand whenever she wants to—but when we look closely for the source of the impulse and ability to perform that action, we find no central executive at the helm. The whole universe is showing up as this opening and closing of the hand and this unfolding event called Joan.

So when you hear that the person is a kind of mirage, or that the body is a conceptual idea, or that you don’t need to take your life personally, these kinds of statements point to the fluidity, the wholeness, the emptiness that is Here / Now. It doesn’t mean that you don’t grieve if your spouse dies or that you no longer have so-called “boundaries” in a psychological or social sense. It doesn’t mean you lose all your personality traits or all your neurotic quirks. It doesn’t mean you don’t apologize when you hurt someone or make a mistake, or that you don’t still have opinions and preferences, or that you don’t ever set goals or make an effort or care about anything. It doesn’t mean that you can’t open and close your hand or shift your focus of attention seemingly “at will,” or that you lose all functional sense of identity as a particular bodymind, or that you can’t tell the difference between yourself and your computer. It just means that you don’t take any of this personally. In fact, you may actually feel life much more deeply when you don’t take it personally. This isn’t about being “impersonal” in the sense of being detached, dissociated or uninvolved. It isn’t about withdrawing from life or denying your humanness. Quite the opposite. It is total intimacy—no separation. You recognize that all of this (your grief, your neurosis, your opinions, your actions) is one whole seamless happening, inseparable from the wind, the trees, the oceans, the tides, the planets, the stars, the galaxies, the black holes and the awareness that beholds it all.

~ Joan Tollifson

Stay tuned for … the 2nd, and concluding, part in this series with another chapter excerpt … from Joan’s Nothing to Grasp …

All italicized text in this post is from Joan’s book and is published here with the publisher New Sarum Press’ generous permission.

And click here for a FREE downloadable copy of the Table of Contents, also made available by the publisher New Sarum Press.

You can purchase the book at Amazon.