Inquiry Meditation says:
Trauma healing can feel good!
The premise of Inquiry Meditation is that healing--which includes healing from trauma, and healing from even quite profound trauma--can feel good.
Indeed, the worse the pain, the more the healing process itself must feel good, deeply good, all along the way, to truly work.
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It's still commonly accepted, though, that healing might need to feel at least a little bad, 'cause that's just how things are.
There are some realities you just have to come to terms with, some feelings you just have to push through, some past events you just have to get over. It could've been worse, after all. Be reasonable.
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Mostly, you accept this. You want to be reasonable.
And yet...
Something about this arrangement feels...off.
YOU ARE RIGHT!
Something is off, there's a much better way!
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Read on below to learn more!
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A somatic experience of softening
Our bodies know that what I described in the above section--being told that we've gotta suck it up, move on, and get over it--is not as good as it gets.
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I call this advice moving from tension. It might not feel good, but it is familiar.
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After all, we've been trained, only since, like, birth, to act from tension.
As adults, this looks like problem and pain-solving by way of...
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barreling through our to-do lists
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cortisol-fueled Googling
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gritted-teeth solving, fixing, going, worrying, obsessing
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the ever-seductive trying & trying & trying
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maybe countless retreats and workshops and classes and seminars
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I call all of this activity reacting, or doing.
This doing wears us down to nubs.
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It leaves us depressed, depleted, numb.
Our bodies shut down.
And sooner or later, our situation/pain resurfaces.
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​​​Contrary to how it may seem, our actual pain isn't what hurts us.
It's the tension we create with all our reacting--all our doing to the pain--that actually hurts.
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In Inquiry Meditation, we learn how to come face to face with our pain without tensing, without reacting.
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Normally, this is the "Oh, fuck" part.
But we're in the magical realm of IM, so this gets to be the "Fuck yeah!" part:).
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Instead of tensing in the face of our pain, Inquiry Meditation teaches us how to remain soft. ​
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I call this softness "nondoing".
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How does it feel to soften, to non-do, to be nonreactive, in the face of our pain?
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Magical. Beautiful.
What happens to our trauma and our unhelpful patterns when we are soft to them, when we non-do to them, when we are nonreactive as they arise?
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Magical things. Beautiful things. ​​
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Continue your IM Learning Adventure and hear directly from IM'ers how they feel about IM!
Click here!
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