The Ashtavakra witnessing consciousness model: an indigenous psychological framework for transforming grief into psychological wellbeing

In modern scholarly perspectives on grieving, being saddened has been associated with bodily experience. Numbness, shaking, a heavy heart, and other physical symptoms are caused by the intense pain of loss. Most Western philosophies have increasingly focused on psychological models based on the idea of how the self adjusts to the devastating experience of losing a loved one, and this has received a lot of attention. To connect death, embodiment, self-identification, and psychological well-being, this conceptual article develops a mourning process from an Indigenous psychological perspective. This article proposes a psychological paradigm grounded in Indigenous contemplative knowledge through an interpretive analysis of the teachings of the Ashtavakra Gita. Rather than treating the Ashtavakra Gita solely as a philosophical or spiritual text, this article interprets it as an Indigenous psychological knowledge system offering culturally grounded insights into selfhood, attachment, suffering, and psychological well-being. The proposed Ashtavakra Witnessing Consciousness Model conceptualises grief as a five-stage, non-linear process involving embodied grief, existential crisis, meaning reframing, mortality acceptance, and witnessing consciousness, culminating in psychological well-being. This model shows how a traumatic incident can be transformed into a meaningful experience and a path to psychological well-being. Advaita Vedanta’s foundational text, the Ashtavakra Gita, presents a nondual viewpoint in which suffering arises from attachment to the body, ego, and interpersonal attachments. It distinguishes between witnessing consciousness and the short-lived embodied self. This psychological Model of Witnessing Consciousness offers an alternative understanding of control, attachment, suffering, and embodied grief, grounded in the Ashtavakra Gita. It highlights the psychological implications of developing the art of witnessing consciousness. This indigenous model of traditional knowledge has implications for existential, contemplative, and meaning-centred mourning therapies and adds a cross-cultural, psychological and philosophically informed perspective to bereavement research. The article explains how the five stages were derived from the text, illustrates the model with a composite case vignette, outlines clinical cautions against encouraging detachment prematurely, and sets out the model’s limitations and directions for empirical validation.