If you are interested in learning more about Diamond Heart-style Inquiry, this video provides a good introduction to the philosophy behind it. The explanation of why and how starts at around the 9:00 mark, and they go into more depth at 25:24.
There are a few types of inquiry, but I do two: Monologue and Repeating Questions. During both, you are encouraged to sense into your breath and your body’s sensations, scanning especially for where there is tension and being curious about it.
1) We start with the Monologue, where you get a certain amount of time, between 5 to 10 minutes of talking, depending on your comfort level. I start off by asking you an open-ended question and hold the space for you while you work through it out loud, being curious about wherever you land as you go. To start us off, I can ask a question like “What is going on for you during this election?” Or maybe you’re wanting to explore your feelings about Israel and Palestine or something else that is going on in the world. This is your time to do your digging. It’s not easy; sometimes we go into it thinking we’ll only have a few things to say, and then the rest of the time will tick away in silence, but eventually new material is able to come to the surface as we “exfoliate”: articulating the answer at the top of the mind to make room for new answers to rise to the surface.
2) After debriefing from the monologue for 3-5 minutes, we will come up with a one or two questions to explore in the second half of the appointment. This brings us to Repeating Questions, where for 5-10 minutes each, you keep coming back to the same question. I will ask the question, you will respond, and when that answer has “run out of gas”, I wait a little bit to make sure you’re done, say “thank-you”, and ask the question again. You give it another go and the process continues. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion. Again, it’s not an easy exercise, but sticking with it can often expose a new thread of insight to start pulling on. We will do one repeating question for ten minutes, or two questions of five minutes each.
Finding a good inquiry partner who is willing to hold the space for you to be curious about what lies beneath the surface of your emotion can be really helpful to break through to new insights. Sometimes you will be able to articulate a sentence you’ve never strung together before, or piece an insight together that’s been eluding you for years. I believe that every provocation, every reaction is an invitation homewards to our original wounds.