Jerry Donoghue ..... (email)

Hello, let me introduce myself and the work I do. I'm a inner coach who helps people connect with their inner experience in ways that supports wholeness and clarity. I believe we all are deeply conditioned to push away or suppress unpleasant experiences: to avoid unpleasant feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in whatever way we define such. When we are in the midst of a unpleasant experience, we naturally long for a pleasant experience. On the other hand, we also try to attract pleasant feelings, thoughts, behaviors into our lives. And when we feel good, we try to hold on to that experience and maybe even fear losing it. Usually this dynamic is operating in the background without awareness. Not only that, but this averting and grasping of our experience arises from an unconscious self-sense whose nature is never questioned. Because of this thick conditioning, I've developed an inner inquiry method which supports awareness in seeing the subtle, in-the-moment identifications with our conditioning. I've found that exceedingly useful!

As I supported others and myself in doing these inquiries, I've discovered there is a deep self-sense or core identities holding feelings, beliefs or constructs about ourselves and the world which constrain or separate us from the flow of life. Like a fish in water, we unconsciously experience our conditioned core identities as "who we are," and consequently never become aware of, or question, the veracity of their beliefs. Further, I noticed how these unconscious identifications express themselves as our positive and negative reactivity in daily life, which we try to control by grasping for or suppressing our experience.

I say all this to explain where my passion lies. My interest is to efficiently support people to directly inquire and bring awareness to these subtle core aspects of themselves. Why? I found that if we can orient our efforts towards these core identities, we can leverage our time, energy and resources when doing personal or spiritual growth practices. The leverage I'm talking about is the difference between spinning around ourselves with a lot of effort that arises out of and stays within our conditioning, and practices that support skillfully bringing awareness to these core identities. When bringing open awareness to our core identities, we experienced what what I call effortless self-corrections.

Sounds good on paper, right? The trick is to learn how to navigate to these core identities without having the inquiry co-opted by protective parts of ourselves that don't want us to be aware or don't want us to connect to these core identities that might hold intense feelings. Sometimes there is fear, sometimes intense pain, and sometimes disorientation and uncertainty about who we are. Allowing such discomfort can be seen as the "fires of transformation" that occur when doing deep inquiry work and seeing through or connecting to these core identities.

It is very easy to derail your inquiry process when intensity comes by subtly becoming identified with a protective part or the intensity itself. For me, gaining clarity about whether I was identified with a protective part or whether open awareness was present during an inquiry was a milestone in my doing efficient and deep awareness work. I developed tools many tools for the presencing of awareness in order to create the conditions for effortless self-corrections to occur that I would like to pass on to others.

I've seen this Inner Empathy work impact people in dramatic ways and others in more subtle ways. The most common response I get from Inner Empathy clients or workshop participants is something along the line of, "I've been doing all this personal growth work or spiritual work for many years and never realized this!" The "this" for each person is different but usually falls into the category of unconscious core identities or beliefs. They emotionally experience how these identities with their beliefs have impacted their lives in such a widespread way. Such awareness directly impacts the quality of their lives.

This Inner Empathy Inquiry work was developed from my own experiences of deep self-inquiry and of supporting hundreds of others in groups and in private sessions. It was developed based upon our experiences of what was effective in supporting our self-inquires. Through trial and error, I synthesized many types of work, pulling broadly from non-dualistic traditions of the East and certain experiential psychological modalities of the West. My intention was to create a powerful method of inquiry that supports people who are engaged in psychological/personal growth work to experience "doing" work from a different space and to incorporate awakening awareness intentions as an overriding informing context. I also held the intention to create something for people who study and have an interest in non-duality and/or awareness work to learn powerful experiential psychological tools to assist them in bringing to awareness the unconscious constructs, beliefs, or unmetabolized feelings that stimulate intense identifications with conditioned life and to avoid what is commonly called spiritual bypassing.

Psychological Studies

I've had a life-long interest in psychology. After sifting through all the many of the various approaches, I concluded that I value the depth psychology models that are nonpathologizing, experiential in nature, and allow people to define what is useful for themselves. After ending a career in training and development, I became interested in experiential group process work to support my own understanding and to learn a new career. The group process work inspired me in many ways. I noticed that whether we sit in a group that is oriented toward psychological healing, or a contemplative nondual group, the skill of becoming aware of, and connecting to what is going on in our experience in the moment, is exceedingly important. Nonviolent Communication (NVC) or Compassionate Communication supports these here-and-now self-connections by building up people's feeling literacy and teaching them to recognize their needs/wants/values. NVC is normally taught in an interpersonal context, however, I saw the value of using the model to tease apart and bring awareness to the flow of whatever was arising internally.

As I was developing this internal work, I came across Internal Family Systems (IFS), a parts model that views the internal world as a system and emphasizes the relationships between internal parts. This supported the notion of the Buddhist teaching on dependent origination in the sense that what is arising is a flow of interrelated parts that amount to supporting conditions. Many psychological approaches look inward using conceptual tools that reify or try to make static the mindstream flow of experience using labels/diagnosis. So IFS system model was refreshing alternative that more aptly honor the flow of experience.

For depth, I also saw value in a constructivist modality called Coherence Therapy which facilitated an understanding of how to organically connect with core fixations, holding patterns, or egoic aspects. If our definition of awakening includes waking up from the assumption that we are our "I" conditioning, then exploring how that sense of "I" is formed and held to inherently to exist is useful. It has been my experience that such sense of self is largely held unconsciously. Blending self-inquiry work by shining the light of awareness on unconscious constructs has been powerful.

Nondual Studies

My studies and practices in nonduality began in 1979 when I was studying Jiddu Krishnamurti discourse about the subject/object split.. At age 21, when contemplating the space between one thought and the next, I experienced an intense nondual opening lasting three days that served to inform me of what life is like outside our conditioning and was inspiration for my life-long studies in nonduality. Since this opening but was not stabilized at the time, I went back to sleep in conditioned life. In various ways, my life since then has been about waking up to my conditioning and deconstructing a sense of self in deep ways.

Although, I'm not associated with any nondual lineage, I enjoy learning from them all. I've enjoyed studying the nondual awareness practices of Avaita Vedanta over the years. In 2004, I was trained in Peter Fenner's Radiant Mind Training, which stimulated a deeper interest and study of the nondual emptiness training of Madyamika Buddhism. I also began to appreciate and study the unconditional allowance and complete fulfillment of Dzogchen. I find myself resonating with the emptiness training because it keeps the idealistic side of me in check that wants to make nondual awareness into something to be lost or gained. I've found it is so easy to project some positive idealistic future attainment onto whatever is being studied or experienced. So I've tried to create an inquiry process that acknowledges and accounts for and keeps in check such tendencies.

Emptiness studies also supported me to creatively synthesize nondual and psychological models as I held them as ultimately being empty. This lead to a focus on the utility of such nondual or psychological tools rather than being subtly snagged by them through the subtle identification that believes they inherently exist and represent the way things are. This has allowed me to build a useful raft that hopefully will self-disintegrated to go no where..or maybe here.

Business Background

My professional background started in the training and development field in 1986 when I founded and was CEO of Montage Productions, Inc, a successful training and development company. I wrote and developed many highly acclaimed training programs. Over 8000 businesses and organizations have benefited from my training programs. In 2001, I sold the company, began exploring how to combine eastern nondual wisdom with western psychology.

All the skills and knowledge I accumulated in the training field were used in creating the Inner Empathy Inquiry method. I view awakening as a training or learning challenge of a particular nature. The learning I speak of is direct learning or direct experiencing. It is not so much about gathering more concepts about awakening, but the application of such concepts.

Today, besides doing one-to-one private Inner Empathy Sessions, I offer experiential Compassionate Communication Training and Inner Empathy courses, retreats, and intensives that are helping people to deeply connect with themselves and others. I recently wrote a book the Inner Empathy Inquiry practices. Inner Empathy: Opening Ourselves To The Heart Of Self-Compassion. The first chapter of the book is available on this site.

Personal Information

I'm a parent of two grown children I love very much. I'm at a place in my life where I am fully exploring and living my many interests, which I've shared below.

Photography: I do a fair amount of hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Being in nature is a life-long passion of mine. These mountains are the oldest mountains in the world. I enjoy photographing the beauty of the mountains and streams. I have a website displaying my photographs if you're interested.

Hand Drumming: In the warm weather months, you'll see me downtown Asheville, NC in the middle of the drum circle in Pritchard Park playing a drum. My drumming buddies and I started the drum circle in this park about 10 years ago. It's a great community event. For me, drumming puts my body into the rhythm of life and allows me to feel the primal pulse. Check it out the video of the drum circle.

Urban Permaculture: My latest interest is in Urban Permacultue gardening. I find getting my hands dirty in the garden and attuning to the ecological systems and changes that happen everyday, supports me on many levels. The physicality of gardening is a rejuvenating antidote to spending so much time in the inner worlds or writing. There is something new everyday and I can touch it. Not mention the delight in growling and eating my own organic fruit and veggies.