The Question Almost No Healer Wants to Sit With
“How the heck were they ever going to help people get out of the main problem, which is victim orientation, if they are victims themselves?”
There is a quiet contradiction sitting at the very centre of so much modern therapy, and almost nobody names it out loud. A great many of the people drawn into psychology are themselves carrying the very wound they intend to treat in others. They study suffering because they have suffered, they learn the language of healing because some part of them longs to be healed, and yet the orientation that created their own pain often remains entirely untouched beneath the training, the certificates, the supervision, and the consulting rooms. Vishrant points straight at this in a recent Satsang exchange with Lisa, a seeker who is a psychotherapist, and what he offers is not a technique or modality, but something far simpler and far more confronting, that you cannot lead another person out of a place you are still living in yourself.
This is not an attack on therapists, and it should not be read as one. It is an invitation extended to the people who genuinely want to help themselves and others, to look honestly at the foundation they are standing on before they reach out a hand to someone else. Because if that foundation is still victim orientation, then the help, however sincere, however skilled, however well intentioned, can only ever carry the other person as far as the helper has travelled themselves. The blind cannot describe the far side of a valley they have never crossed. And so the question is practical rather than philosophical, have you healed the thing in yourself that you are now charging other people to heal in them?
Watch the Satsang excerpt here:
A Longing to Wake Up That Will Not Be Ignored
“The longing to wake up has always been there, I think, from a very young age, and I’m feeling it more and more.”
Lisa arrives new to Vishrant’s work, having come across his name only two weeks earlier, and she describes her presence in the Satsang as her attempt to step into her own resistance. That phrase alone tells you a great deal about her. She is not pretending she has it handled. She speaks of a burning in the heart, a longing to wake up that has lived in her since she was very young, and which is intensifying now as the world around her appears to grow more chaotic by the day. It is a longing many people resonate with, a pull toward something more real than the life of accumulation and achievement that the world keeps insisting is the point.
What is striking is that she does not come asking for comfort or reassurance. She comes asking for help to wake up, which is a rarer and far more dangerous request than most people realise, because it is a request to lose the very self that is doing the asking. Vishrant does not flatter the longing or romanticise it. Instead, the moment she mentions resistance, he leans in, because in that single word the entire conversation finds its centre. The longing to wake up is genuine, but a longing alone wakes no one. What matters is the direction you are facing, and resistance, he is about to make clear, is facing precisely the wrong way. This is the kind of work that deepens enormously when it is done in person, which is why so many people who feel this same longing eventually come to Satsang or sit a retreat with Vishrant, where the pull toward awakening can be met directly rather than merely thought about.
Why Resistance Is Always the Wrong Direction
“Resistance is the creator of suffering, and so we are responsible for our own suffering.”
Resistance, Vishrant says plainly, is the wrong direction. We are trained in it from school onward, conditioned to push against whatever we do not like, taught that to resist is to be strong and that to accept is to be weak. That conditioning runs so deep that most people never question it, and it quietly guarantees a life of pain. His point here is stark and freeing at the same time. Bad things will always happen in the world, and bad things will always happen to us. That much is not negotiable, it is simply the nature of being alive in a human body. What is negotiable, entirely and always, is whether we suffer over them.
If we offer resistance, we suffer. If instead we offer acceptance and let go, the suffering does not arise. This places the responsibility for our suffering squarely with us, and nobody else. It is not the event that wounds us, it is the contraction we generate in response to the event. This is not a comfortable idea for the part of us that wants to be rescued, that wants to locate the source of its pain out there in other people and circumstances, but it is precisely the doorway to a freedom that no external condition can ever take away. If your suffering were caused by the world, you would be helpless, at the mercy of everything. If your suffering is created by your own resistance, then you hold the key. Vishrant is handing Lisa that key in the opening minutes, and the rest of the conversation is simply him showing her, again and again, how to turn it.
The World Has Always Been Crazy
“It’s always been crazy. Depends on who’s running the news as to what we see.”
Lisa says the world feels like it is getting crazier, and Vishrant gently takes the premise apart. The world has always been crazy. Whether it appears that way at any given moment depends largely on who is running the news and what they choose to put in front of us. News stations, he observes, are built to highlight the rubbish, the wars, the killings, the disasters, because that is what captures and holds our attention. If they were doing their job properly, we would always have believed the world was falling apart, because making it look that way is quite literally their function. The sense of escalating catastrophe is, to a significant degree, a manufactured product we consume daily and take as reality.
Then he brings it down to the only place it can actually be tested, the present moment. Right now, he asks, what is really happening? Almost always, nothing. And when he asks Lisa whether, right now, in her own head, anything is genuinely happening, she has to admit, not really. This is the quiet revelation hiding inside the exchange. The chaos does not live in the streets, it lives in the head, conjured the instant we begin thinking about the world rather than meeting the moment we are actually standing in. There have always been wars and there have always been killings, this is the long and unflattering nature of human beings, and absorbing it through a constant media stream simply convinces us that this particular moment is uniquely collapsing. It is not. Much of the catastrophe is a production of the mind, and seeing that clearly is the first real loosening of its grip on us.
Without Victims, There Would Be No Clients
“If your clients weren’t running victim-orientated thinking, you wouldn’t have any clients.”
Then comes the line that lands closest to home for anyone in the helping professions. If your clients were not running victim-orientated thinking, Vishrant tells Lisa, you would not have any clients. It sounds blunt, even provocative, and he knows it, telling her to genuinely look at it. People seek out a psychotherapist or a counsellor because they are being a victim of something. Remove the victimhood and, in most cases, the need for the counsellor dissolves along with it. This is not cynicism, it is a description of the actual mechanism that disturbs most people.
He speaks from direct experience, having worked as a psychotherapist for ten years. His whole approach, he says, was to take victimness off people, and the natural and somewhat inconvenient consequence was that it steadily emptied his practice, because a person who is no longer being a victim simply does not need a therapist in the same way. His entire crux of teaching was to show people that being a victim is a choice. Bad things genuinely happen, there is no denying that, but the one who chooses to become a victim of those things is also the one who moves into blame, and blame always points away from the self and toward someone or something else. And the instant blame appears, so does the potential for anger, which Vishrant describes as a form of violence. Help someone remove their victim orientation, and you have addressed the majority of their problem, because the difficult events of life come to everyone alike. It is the orientation toward those events, not the events themselves, that decides whether there is suffering.
It Begins With You Never Being a Victim Again
“Guess where it begins? It begins with you never being a victim again.”
Here Vishrant turns the teaching back onto the teacher, and this is the beating heart of the whole exchange. If you want complete confidence in teaching people to step out of victimhood, guess where it begins? It begins with you never being a victim again. You cannot transmit what you do not embody. This is why so much of psychology struggles to deliver the freedom it implicitly promises, because, as he found when he trained in it himself, a great many of the practitioners were themselves victim orientated. A victim cannot lead another person out of victimhood any more than someone lost in the jungle can guide someone else out. The teacher’s own state of being is far more important than anything they say.
Lisa recognises this immediately in herself, observing that she cannot be fully of benefit while she is still identified with her own thoughts, while she is still resisting her clients’ suffering. And that is exactly the trap, the well-meaning healer caught in resistance to the very pain they are trying to relieve, unknowingly reinforcing the structure of suffering even as they work to dismantle it. The answer Vishrant gives is almost shockingly simple. Just remove victim orientation, and you have made the major step toward freedom. Meet someone who is not victim orientated and they will be happy. Meet someone who is, and they will be miserable. It really is that simple, and he openly prefers to keep it simple rather than dress it in complexity. Every time you teach it, he tells her, it becomes more your own way of being in the world, so the act of teaching it is also the practice of embodying it. This is also why doing the work alongside Vishrant accelerates everything, because there you are not only learning the teaching, you are sitting in the presence of someone who fully lives it.
Fear, the Loss of Self, and the Practice of Letting Go
“How can you wake up when you’re living in resistance to life?”
The longing to wake up, Vishrant agrees, can be very strong, but he asks how anyone can possibly wake up while still living in resistance to life. Enlightenment, in his description, is awareness becoming aware of itself, and it cannot remain aware of itself while the mind keeps dragging awareness back into resistance to whatever is arising. Someone who is awake is, by definition, not resisting life, because if they were resisting it they would not be awake. So the practice becomes clear and unglamorous. Do not support resistance in yourself, support acceptance and letting go, and through that, learn to master what he calls unconditional surrender, a non-doing that none of us were ever trained in at school, university, or anywhere else.
As it happens, Lisa did receive some of that training, having attended a mindfulness-based university founded by a Tibetan Buddhist, where acceptance, letting go, and the cultivation of beginner’s mind are taught, the disposition of the perpetual student who keeps questioning and never simply believes. Even so, she admits to her resistance, her fear, and confesses that the whole process feels like a slow trickle. Vishrant meets the fear head-on. Fear is a terrible master, a genuine requirement for survival in our early years, but after the age of twenty or so we already know what is dangerous and how to avoid it, and yet fear stubbornly refuses to leave, and so we are stuck with it for life unless we consciously refuse to serve it. He refused to serve it from boyhood, having grown up in a Roman Catholic boarding school where fear and guilt were the instruments of control, and he simply declined to be controlled by either.
Beneath the fear, Lisa senses something more specific, a fear of losing the self itself. You make it okay, Vishrant says, there is no other choice, because if you do not make it okay you may as well forget about awakening altogether. As you come closer to enlightenment, awareness becomes aware of itself and you begin to find yourself as the emptiness, as the nothingness. The self does eventually go, and what is left is nothing, which he calls beautiful, because the ego, in his characteristically plain words, is a right pain in the backside. The thing the mind most fears losing turns out to be the very thing whose loss is freedom. This is precisely the territory where having an awake teacher matters most, and why people return again and again to Satsang and to retreat, because the fear of losing the self is rarely walked through alone.
Maturity, Choice, and Why People Fight to Stay Victims
“People will arm-wrestle you for their right to be a victim.”
Vishrant offers Lisa a practical motivator she can use when she teaches this, and he is honest that it is a negative one. Do you want to be a mature adult or an immature adult? Blaming other people for how you feel is immaturity, a refusal to take responsibility for yourself, while recognising that the only person who can make you feel anything is you carries an enormous and largely unclaimed freedom. It is mature, and many people quietly prefer immaturity, because blame is easier than responsibility, and being a victim asks nothing of you except your continued suffering. Someone can smash into your car, and you can either become a massive victim of the inconvenience, wounding yourself terribly while changing absolutely nothing, or you can simply see what is, take the licence number, get the insurer onto it, and have the car repaired. Either way the car still needs fixing. Only the suffering is optional, added on top by you.
He learned all of this at nineteen from Ken Keyes’ Handbook to Higher Consciousness, a book he read something like twenty times because the discovery felt so magical to him, the realisation that he, and not the world or other people, was the creator of his own suffering. At that age he was, by his own admission, a massive victim and an angry young man, but he learned never to be a victim again, developing an internal stop button that halted victimhood the moment it began to arise. He tried to teach it to his family and they hated him for it, and he warns Lisa that people will fight her, that they will arm-wrestle her for their right to be a victim. Yet he urges her to plant the seed as often as she can, because you never know who will take it on, and the resistance she meets will simply make her a better communicator. And he leaves her with the pointer that quietly ties the whole conversation together, that you cannot be open and be a victim at the same time. Openness, he says, counts for everything.
An Invitation to Look Directly
What Vishrant offers Lisa, and through her offers anyone working to help others, is not a more refined technique for managing suffering, it is an invitation to dismantle the thing that produces the suffering in the first place. Victim orientation is not a problem to be soothed session after session, it is a choice that can be seen, questioned, and set down, and the moment it is set down a great deal of what looked like a complicated psychological problem simply has nowhere left to stand. The healer who has done this in themselves no longer needs to resist their client’s pain, because they are no longer resisting their own, and from that openness a genuine transmission becomes possible.
If something in this is stirring the same longing Lisa described, the real work is not done by reading about it but by stepping into it, and you are warmly invited to come and sit in Satsang with Vishrant or to join him on retreat, where this undoing can be done directly, in his presence, rather than alone in your own head. No amount of agreeing with these words on a page can substitute for the felt recognition that your suffering has always been your own creation, and therefore your own to release. The longing to wake up that Lisa describes lives in many hearts, growing stronger as the world grows louder, and the way through it is not more resistance but acceptance, not more blame but responsibility, not the strengthening of the self but the willing loss of it. That is the doorway, and it opens, as Vishrant says, with you never being a victim again. Come and do the work with him and find out for yourself.
