What is meditative inquiry? How can it help me connect to myself and others in a more authentic way?
The challenge
As adults in modern societies, we can tend to experience ourselves as heads that just happen to have bodies (and smartphones) attached to them.
Not only that, but our heads also tend to contain multitudes of identities, such as employee or entrepreneur, our family status, perhaps something related to our spiritual journey, and so on.
You’ve likely heard of yoga and meditation. Their aim is to help you integrate the totality of your human experience.
When you start to observe it, it’s staggering to notice how driven we are by our roles. Just how much customary mechanisms in everyday life determine how we act. Each of us has a selection of different roles we take on, as we feel appropriate, in various social interactions.
We may feel we don’t actually even know which one of these roles is actually me, or if any of them is? All this switching between roles can be an exhausting experience if you don’t have a way to take a break.
It is a genuine human need to find a way to let go of roles every now and then. To simply let oneself relax into a simpler existence for a bit.
Inquiry: Meditation in human connection
So meditation can help, but it can also be a huge challenge to allow just… what? Doing nothing? 🙂
Where relaxing into being really gets interesting and engaging is when you can relax into presence in connection with another, while being completely freed from social games.
Sounds hard, even impossible? It can actually be pretty straightforward to build a space of relaxed connection to others. In connection to pretty much anyone!
What if you could connect with other human beings just as you are, without necessarily engaging in any of your roles? Just enjoying connection without agenda or needing to solve anything for a while?
Curious yet? 🙂
The practice I’ve found to be the most effective and to-the-point for this is called inquiry, or meditative inquiry. It is a reflective practice of connection between two or more people.
While it allows you to just relax into your being, inquiry can also allow you to observe your roles, and to learn about what’s actually happening within you. Inquiry can robustly support in your journey to what’s the most important learning path in your life – learning to really connect with yourself.
If you’d like I can guide you through the practice itself.