Trauma to Tranquility
ꙩInquiry
A solution to emotional pain? That’s a big claim, but it reflects nearly 40 years of research and development. It puts understandings of psychology, neurology, and physiology together with tried and true holistic tools.
One participant stated that a single session of ꙩInquiry is like 2 years of psychotherapy, but actually, it's not quite that.
In fact, ꙩInquiry brings one to experiences of oneself that are not usually considered or understood in psychotherapy. Both work on the sense of self or ego, the network of beliefs and feelings we hold about who and what we are. Psychology works to build, hone or adapt to parts of the ego that are interfering with ease of function. ꙩInquiry instead acts to eliminate them.
Elimination of ego is a concept shared by a number of spiritual paths. It is not generally considered to be a possibility in psychology.
The simplest explanation. Expressions of ego that are problematic are usually accompanied by painful emotions. That pain is experienced in the body, the result of habitual physiological reactions to the sense that you — your ego, that is — is not enough or it is threatened.
ꙩInquiry unravels and actually erases those body reactions. When the body is quiet — the zero-point is attained. It is the moment when your brain is not referring to the past to predict your future. You become in a word, present. The problem you arrived with either no longer feels like a problem, or you feel you have the capacity to handle it. The part of the ego that believed in the problem, or as you being the problem, has ceased to exist.
So when a part of the ego is gone, along with the body’s reactions, what's left? Access to your deeper qualities, more of your full psychobiological capacity, but also to your actual, true nature, aka your spiritual source. Both of these may be able to be directly experienced.
In a nutshell, that’s ꙩInquiry.
The experience of ꙩInquiry
A session begins by simply being where you are now, which is usually a place of some suffering, though some also come in to keep ahead of their process. With ꙩInquiry, we are talking about mental or emotional suffering.
You might consider it to be “normal” or “expected” suffering, like the grief that comes from loss of a loved one or the breakup of a relationship, or doubt and insecurity that comes from loss of a home or job. It could be the suffering that follows a trauma.
Often though, we don’t really know why we are anxious, depressed, full of rage, or simply neglecting our own best interests. But ꙩInquiry is not exactly about figuring out why -- though that understanding may be found as a kind of side-effect of the work -- it is about eliminating the habitual, outdated processes of body and mind that are keeping you locked in this particular state.
This is all you really need to know to understand why you might want to try ꙩInquiry. Either you want to reduce your suffering, you are seeking spiritual awakening, or you are just curious.
All you have to lose is the old, stale, painful, burdensome, involuntary patterns that control your thoughts, feelings, actions, physiology and perceptions.
Just who do you think you are?
Take a deeper dive into
Spiritual teachings sometimes talk about eliminating the ego as a prerequisite to awakening or enlightenment. A frequent metaphor that is used to elucidate spiritual awakening is that of the wave and the ocean. The ocean is a consciousness that is all of creation, and the wave is us, an emanation or expression of the ocean. The ego, what we think we are, however, cannot perceive the ocean. We believe we are only a separate wave without an ocean -- could we call it a puddle?
But that metaphor implies a fluid that can swell and subside, emerge and disappear. The ego is more like frozen ocean water, an iceberg floating with most of its mass submerged and invisible. In fact, the ego as a whole is not just one iceberg, it is more like a berg continent, the fusion of many icebergs. It is composed of many parts, many selves or self-images as they are sometimes known.
Perhaps you are living your life in relative comfort on your perch; you have even fashioned it into a throne, of a sort. You are probably not reading this -- unless that is, one of two things has occurred. Either you have a sense that even a throne can be confining and wonder what more there is, or something has occurred that is causing your perch to crack or crumble. If this has happened, you may imagine in fear, the feeling of plummeting down the jagged slopes toward the ruts below, and trying to grab whatever handhold is possible.
Some of us find it exciting to challenge the bergs, trying to jump from one tip to the next, skiing down the slopes or climbing the ice cliffs. You are probably not reading this either.
One can be in any position on their continent, striving to stay on a peak and perfect it, struggling to reach a peak, carving out a ledge on a slope, or living in a rutted valley, trying to endure the isolation and darkness.
Whether motivated by curiosity or pain, some of us try to understand our iceberg, inquiring into its structure and makeup, wondering about the secrets it holds and how and why we have come to find ourselves on this part at this time.
Still others are what we call spiritual seekers, people who have a sense that the iceberg is not all that they are. You may have taken a dip, or even disappeared at one time or another into the surprisingly warm and buoyant waters of the ocean. Having had a taste, you may know (though then forget over and over) that where you perceive themselves to be on the iceberg is not who you are. That knowing may bring a hunger to be immersed in that open water, to always have the experience of being the open water.
There is a kind of paradox here. From the perspective of being the iceberg -- the only perspective many of us have --- the prospect of its loss or destruction is terrifying, equivalent to the loss of our actual life. Yet, any psychologist will tell you that your identity is only a construct, a necessary construct, but still, only an idea that exists in your brain.
From this conventional view, the only option is to try to build or rebuild your iceberg, but as the saying goes, ‘you can never get enough of what doesn't really work’. Even the most shiny ego you can think of, perhaps belonging to some person of accomplishment you secretly wish you were more like, is still faced with the same dilemma. As long as one lives from the perspective of the ego, they are living a limited life, and subject to the same ego-related fears and pain as everyone else.