Self-inquiry is a profound practice of exploring your true self and examining your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and patterns to cultivate self-awareness and gain transformative insights for your spiritual growth and embodiment. Self-inquiry is a powerful tool for dissolving conditioning and rediscovering your true nature. By practising self-inquiry with commitment, you can identify the inner blocks, reactive patterns, and evolutionary lessons behind your life challenges; uncover your true needs, values, gifts, and potential by aligning with your true self; and recognise, embrace, and integrate your true nature for deeper embodiment. For best results and to maximise the potential for self-awareness and non-reactivity, practise self-inquiry in a mindful, meditative state.
Preparing for Self-Inquiry
- Set aside some quiet time in your day for your self-inquiry practice, safeguarding it with clear boundaries so you are not disturbed by the intrusions of others.
- When you are ready, remove any distractions, including your phone, and adjust the lighting and temperature to your comfort. You can sit or lie down, ensuring you are both comfortable and alert.
- Take a few moments to relax your body and let go of any tension.
- Focus your attention on your breath, anchoring your attention in the present moment as you breathe in and out. Should any thoughts or feelings distract your attention, simply bring your attention back to your breath without judgement.
- Once you have entered a mindful state and can hold a degree of stillness within your mind, become aware of yourself as a centre of pure consciousness and being as you call in your true self. This is the real you beyond your personality.
- You are now ready to set your intention for your self-inquiry.
Centring your attention with mindfulness empowers your self-inquiry by freeing you from the distractions and entanglements of your mind and inducing a metacognitive state that enables you to be fully present and aware in your observer self. You can then more effectively align with your true self for greater authenticity in your self-inquiry. For more on your true self and your alignment with it, see The True Self, A Meditation to Find Your True Self, and Finding Your True Self.
Setting an Intention for Your Self-Inquiry
Set an intention for your self-inquiry to focus your self-inquiry and draw upon the support of your true self. Your intention is the inner call of your self-inquiry that you will await a response to. Make it positive and sacred.
Here are a few examples of intentions, prefaced with an affirmation of openness:
- I open to my true nature.
- I open to my true life purpose.
- I open to what is most important to me at this time.
- I open to my authentic values.
- I open to my authentic needs.
- I open to the root cause of the avoidant patterns within me.
- I open to the most important inner block for me to release now.
Self-Inquiry
Here are the steps for the actual self-inquiry. Allow at least 15-20 minutes for the process to complete.
- Focus on your intention and address it to your true self. As you have created an alignment with your true self, you are inviting a response to come to you from your true self or with the help of your true self.
- When you sense that the intention has been received, let it go and remain open for a response to come as you stay present in a state of attunement.
- If your attention is distracted, notice this without judgement and gently bring it back and re-attune. The purpose is not to think, but to receive.
- When you feel that your self-inquiry is complete, bring yourself back to your body, open your eyes, and write down your experiences. This is especially important when insights have emerged in your self-inquiry that require further processing and putting into practice.
Common Uses for Self-Inquiry
Self-inquiry can illuminate many aspects of your journey. Here are some key applications:
Inner Guidance
If your self-inquiry is focused on seeking inner guidance, you may receive it as direct realisation, words, or visions. The guidance can be symbolic. For example, if you are visual, a symbolic vision of a growing flower or an ascent of a mountain might symbolise the need for inner growth. If the symbolic meaning isn’t immediately obvious, contemplate the symbol with the intention that its meaning is revealed in a different way.
Identifying Authentic Needs and Values
If your self-inquiry is focused on exploring your authentic needs, be open to exploring a wide range of needs across various areas, such as health and wellness, relationships, community, vocation, recreation, and self-realisation. When inquiring into your authentic values, seek those values that align with your true nature.
As insights into your authentic needs or values emerge during self-inquiry, notice whether these insights keep you in your authentic state of being when you focus on them. They should add to your sense of truth, authenticity, presence, being, clarity, lightness, vitality, freedom, peace, and unity. For some people, the confirmation of authenticity manifests as a tingling sensation along with a sense of certain knowing. If the insights do not satisfy you as being authentic and do not help you feel centred, let them go: they may represent distortions of your authentic needs or values, or they may simply be random material spontaneously emerging.
Identifying Limiting Thoughts and Beliefs, Reactive Patterns, and Shadow Aspects
Use self-inquiry to identify limiting thoughts and beliefs, as well as reactive patterns and shadow aspects—the repressed aspects of yourself that you may be reluctant to acknowledge. For more on this process, refer to How to Release Negative Patterns Effectively. As your self-inquiry unfolds, you may spontaneously realise the things to release, or you may uncover them by observing life situations or other images flash before you. You can then trace them back to their origin through age regression or by asking yourself: When was the earliest time that I felt, thought, or behaved in this way?
Once you have finished identifying the material to release, repeat your self-inquiry to gain further insight into processing and releasing it. Then, continue to implement the steps for release as detailed in How to Release Negative Patterns Effectively.
Awakening to Your True Self and Realising Your True Nature
The most powerful use of self-inquiry is to awaken to your true self and realise your true nature. For this, allow your sense of identity to expand beyond limitation into a direct experience of your spiritual essence. This direct experience of your true nature transcends rational understanding or representation.
What Follows Self-Inquiry?
Sometimes, self-inquiry spontaneously transforms and liberates you. The realisation of your true nature can be like a strike of lightning against the tower of your personality, or a suffusing light that permeates your personality, calling it back to greater truth, spiritual alignment, and greater embodiment of light. Negative patterns can start to lose their power or even burn away in the light of your self-realisation.
Other times, your self-inquiry can reveal powerful insights that you need to respond to. For example, having identified negative patterns and their origin, you can then work on transforming them positively and integrating them into your personality for greater self-development, authenticity, and wellbeing. To learn more about this process, check out How to Release Negative Patterns Effectively.
If your self-inquiry feels incomplete, revisit it another time when you are in a better state of readiness or attunement. It could be that your intention for self-inquiry needs rephrasing, or it could be that you have indeed received an answer but have not recognised it. Sometimes, the response to your self-inquiry intention may continue to unfold after your practice is over, and you will be shown the answer later on as things evolve.
Whatever the case, a commitment to embody the truth and wisdom you have realised in self-inquiry is an exciting responsibility for you to fulfil with practical, light-filled action. It is ultimately why you are here.
Next step: Self-inquiry is a powerful catalyst for awakening, but guidance can amplify your breakthroughs and help you integrate them fully. Book a Guidance Call with me to develop your self-inquiry skills further, release hidden blocks, and step into greater embodiment of your true self.