What is the Diamond Approach?

We long to find meaning and fulfillment in our lives, to find inner peace, and to know the truth of who we are. Access to our fundamental nature, to the essence of who we are, is what the Diamond Approach facilitates. The Diamond Approach was developed by A. H. Almaas. It is a spiritual path that grew out of and in response to the needs of seekers leading ordinary lives in our contemporary cultures. The Diamond Approach bridges the traditional dichotomies of the psychological and the spiritual, body and the soul, the sublime and the mundane. Timeless spiritual insight together with contemporary psychological understanding enables us to address the obstacles to realization unique to our time, place, culture, and personality. Rather than viewing the ego or personality as an enemy to be overcome or transcended, the Diamond Approach works with our psychological structure in such a way that it is metabolized though direct understanding, thus becoming increasingly more transparent and less real experientially. Visit diamondapproach.org for more information.

Central to this work is the practice of presence and inquiry. By sensing into our direct experience and exploring its contents, including the various structures of our ego and the personal history that put them in place, students of the Diamond Approach discover doorways to our essential nature. This openness to our experience creates a field of awareness necessary for the expansion and revelation of ever more subtle dimensions of reality that have traditionally been available only to the few.

In the course of this on-going work, we will investigate how True Nature reveals Itself, its characteristics, and the compensatory movements of the ego structure, which veil the truth of Being. Unique and central to the Diamond Approach is its emphasis on the personal aspects of spiritual reality, in a way that is different from most spiritual paths. This process honors, supports, and develops the uniqueness of each individual to their fullest potential. Beingness in our own personal, human form becomes a stepping stone from ordinary consciousness to the transcendent oneness of spiritual reality. This path supports students to live in the world while being aware of their deepest nature, living a life in the world but not of it.

The Diamond Approach is taught through a combination of evocative lectures, experiential exercises designed to enable group members to contact the material within themselves, process work in smaller groups, private sessions, and meditation periods.

More Resources

Learn more about the Ridhwan School, home of the Diamond Approach teachings.

Recordings of talks by A. H. Almaas are also available through Sounds True.

Read more articles about the Diamond Approach.