It’s easy to lose your head on the spiritual path – but true insight comes with practice

REVIEW Headless Way: A Day With Richard Lang

The room is filled with smiling, headless people, or so they are claiming to be. As am I: a headless man looking at headless men and women looking back each other. Our teacher, Richard Lang, gleefully, if a little bafflingly, says we are all “face to no face”. We are here to learn more about what this means via the Headless Way.

This purports to be a direct and instant route into the experience of pure consciousness – a state of open awareness in which all phenomena emerge, from thoughts to sights, sounds, sensations, everything.

It’s a state pointed to in many spiritual traditions, including different strands of classical yoga as well as branches of Buddhism such as Mahamudra and Zen. These traditional approaches hold that the experience is always there with you, instantly available, but it’s taken as read that you need to spend a long time meditating or otherwise practising to get it. The result is nothing less than enlightenment.

With the Headless Way, though, there’s no need to shave your head and stare at a wall for years on end; pure consciousness – indeed enlightenment – can be experienced right now by anyone who cares to experience it.

Take a few moments to look out into the world; now notice that you cannot see your head, that all there is to see are the sights out there, that you cannot see the one who sees. That one is pure consciousness, or, as it’s said in the Headless Way, your true nature. This is naturally much simplified and is not intended to convey the concept with any depth, simply to state it in its most basic form.

The approach was first explicated by the English spiritual teacher Douglas Harding in his 1961 book On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, and since his death in 2007 his torch has largely been carried by his student – and our host today – Richard Lang. The work has had a minor resurgence in recent years thanks to the inclusion of Harding’s teachings, as well as mini courses by his successor, on Sam Harris’s meditation app Waking Up, which is where I first came across it a few years ago.

I’ve found it an excellent little mind hack and, working with it with varying degrees of commitment over time, it’s helped to enrich my meditation practice, clarifying in a down-to-earth way an experience that’s traditionally conveyed in more esoteric language. That said, I do not consider it to have made me an enlightened being. I think of the Headless Way as a kind of parlour trick, albeit a powerful one that can offer useful pointers on the seeker’s path.

Richard has been generous in sharing this work and the practices – or experiments, in Headless Way parlance – associated with it. There is a free app that amounts to a comprehensive course in the method, as well as a website with plenty of useful material and a YouTube channel, not to mention regular live Zoom sessions where the work is explored. This is an honourable exception to the general rule of the modern industrial spiritual complex of monetised Buddhism and mindfulness.

While I had some familiarity with the Headless Way from practices learnt online, I was keen to learn more at an in-person workshop, which is how I found myself in a room full of the headless in Stoke Newington, London. I can’t say I really learnt much more than I already knew about it, but it was interesting to spend a day practising with fellow seekers.

Richard is an inspiring teacher whose enthusiasm for what he is offering is palpable and built on years of experience – he started practising with Harding when he was 17 and is today 71. He spent the first part of the morning session outlining the theory of the Headless Way, which is essentially an approach to non-dual awareness, then guided us into some of the exercises used to convey it. These were engaging, and did what they were supposed to do.

There was an underlying feeling for me, however, that while our teacher kept stressing that we shouldn’t accept anything on his say-so alone, but test it for ourselves, he was clearly holding up precise hoops to jump through, and that we did. In particular, it felt like we were being strongly nudged to express what we were experiencing in the very specific, sightly corny language of the Headless Way – face to no face, I am space for you, you are space for me, etc.

It was at this point that the whole thing began to feel a little groupthink to me, if not borderline culty. Clearly no one can force you to have a particular mental experience, but somehow in situations like this it’s very easy to simply go with the flow, to not be the awkward customer, especially when guided with such passionate confidence by the teacher.

There was very little space for personal reflection on what we were doing and the group discussions were both tightly controlled and very brief. There was a lot to get through, perhaps, but I kept wishing for more time simply to absorb and reflect on the practices.

I struggled a bit with the afternoon session, which involved more experiments but this time with a lot more inter-personal contact between participants. Richard kept making the point that it was important to find and spend time with others who follow the Headless Way, to express the creeds of the method out loud; he called it being among friends. Essentially, this is the same thing that yogis call sangha, or spiritual community. Which in principle is a good thing.

But it felt to me like a bunch of strangers were being moulded into an instant group of friends by being brought into very close contact – putting arms around each other’s waists, sitting in close one-to-one conversations to say things like, “I am space for you, you are space for me”, and holding hands during a group meditation.

This might work for some people, but to me it felt forced and awkward; I was overwhelmed to the point where I began merely waiting for it all to end. Hand on heart, if I’d known before the afternoon session that things would get so literally hands on, I’d have left after polishing off my packed lunch.

If you’re interested in nondual awareness, I’d definitely encourage you to look into what Richard’s offering. What’s online is excellent, and a workshop like the one I attended would be a breeze to anyone who’s happy with corporate team-building-type work. For those, like me, who are a little less free with hugs, maybe not so much.