See also: How does the practice work in concrete terms?
I believe you may share something of this experience.
You, too, may sometimes experience yourself as a head that happens to have a body attached to it. And a smartphone.
On top of that, countless identities are circulating in your mind, waiting to be identified with: employee or entrepreneur, your role within your family, perhaps something related to your worldview or personal development, and so on.
You have probably heard of yoga or meditation, or may even have practised them yourself. Their purpose is to help you integrate—to “bring home”—your experience as a unified whole: everything your experience contains, moment by moment.
When you begin to look more closely, it can be startling to notice how driven we are by our roles. How many automatic patterns shape our everyday lives and determine how we behave. All of us have a selection of different roles that we take on in different situations and interactions.
At times, you may feel that you do not even know which of these roles is really you—or whether any of them are. Constantly switching between roles can be exhausting unless you have an effective way to take a break from them. How do you really feel?
There is a genuine human need to occasionally find a deeper connection with ourselves—to let go of our roles and come into contact with something more neutral within us.
Accepting, Conscious Presence in Connection with Another Person
Accepting, conscious presence—sometimes also called meditation—can help. At times, however, it can feel like a major challenge to do… what, exactly? Nothing? 😉
Accepting presence becomes especially interesting when you can relax in the company of another person while remaining completely free from social games or rules.
What if you could genuinely interact with others without necessarily needing your roles? Simply enjoying the fact that neither of you has a particular goal or anything to solve—and yet the situation still feels alive?
Does that sound difficult, perhaps even impossible? In reality, achieving a relaxed sense of connection can be quite straightforward—with almost anyone.
Curious yet? 🙂
The practice I have found to be the most effective and concise way of achieving this is called self-inquiry, or simply inquiry. It is a practice in which two or more people explore their own experience while also remaining present with the other people in the room.
While the self-inquiry practice allows you simply to relax into your own being, it also has enough depth to explore the human experience in a highly versatile way. It can be used, for example, to examine the roles you take on and to observe more closely everything that is happening within you.
Most of us are not able to sense our truest feelings or our bodies very accurately. However, it is possible to learn how to come into contact with them.
Self-inquiry can support you powerfully on the most important learning journey of your life: developing a genuine connection with who you fundamentally are.