Self-Inquiry is the Only Spiritual Practice You Need

How to use self-inquiry as a daily spiritual practice.

Up until recently, I wouldn’t say I had a daily spiritual practice. I meditate to help clear my energy and center myself, but there are days that I forget. I do yoga when it feels good in my body, but I certainly don’t do that every day.

Sometimes, I even judge myself for not doing these things. I think “I’m so bad at this spirituality business. I can’t even do 20 minutes of yoga a day. How am I going to stay in alignment?” Ahah.

It wasn’t until a few days ago I came to realize that self-inquiry is a spiritual practice that I implement pretty much all the time and that it’s done more for my spiritual development than any other practice, including meditation and hatha yoga.

What is Self-Inquiry?

Self-inquiry is, put simply, a practice of self-awareness. Its origins can be traced back to Vedantic philosophy’s Vichara, meaning ‘thought’ or ‘deliberation’. It’s a yogic practice that uses thought analysis to discern between reality (consciousness, or Spirit, or God, or truth — whatever it is you call the thing beyond the mind that connects us all) and the Self, as conceptualized by the ego.

The practice has also been popularized by Hindu sage Sri Ramana Maharshi. I came across the concept by way of Adyashanti, a well-known spiritual teacher whose background is Buddhist, but who now ascribes to no particular religion or philosophy. He’d taken on self-inquiry as his primary spiritual practice after his awakening. I’d begun doing the same, without having a name for it; it was helpful to contextualize the work I was doing.

My ego breakdown happened spontaneously, without conscious effort on my part, but the unraveling sped up the process that had already been unfolding within me — the process of seeing my thoughts and emotions and disidentifying with them. I’d see them clearly enough to determine what was a fabrication based on my past programming or ego and then, armed with that awareness, no longer had to live from a sense of self that was based on those false perceptions.

For example, I once found myself in a yoga class feeling superior to other yogis. I’d had this transformative experience of ego dissolution, a constant feeling of energy flowing up my spine, and here they were in class doing kundalini yoga trying to bring it about. My ego gripped onto that experience as something to be proud of — I thought of myself as special.

Not a particularly nice trait, superiority. I could have ignored it or buried it, but I didn’t. I just saw it. Then, at the same moment, I was outside of myself enough to know that since the feeling of superiority came entirely from the ego, it simply wasn’t true. I didn't have to shove the feeling of superiority away. I just had to acknowledge it was false. Then, of course, it had no weight.

This was self-inquiry.

How Do You Practice Self-Inquiry?

Step 1: Know Your Mind

Self-Inquiry requires a certain clarity of thought. I think what meditation can do, given time, is help slow the mind and give the practitioner a better understanding of where their thoughts are coming from. What are the voices in your head? Everyone’s ego-mind is different, has different ways it likes to grip onto identity. It’s important to know your own mind, not just look for the thing someone else looks for.

As it is for many, I would imagine, my mind isn’t quiet during meditation. I don’t put the pressure on myself for it to be. The mind creates thoughts; that’s what it’s made for. And so I let the thoughts exist and let them go.

This alone is more than we might normally allow ourselves, however. Just the practice of giving the thoughts space, seeing them instead of letting them run on autopilot in the unconscious, does the work of making us more aware of the nature and flavor of the thoughts that arise in our mind.

Another way to slow the mind down or become more aware of this is journaling. At one point, I was journaling every single day. That kind of processing is intense, but it was crucial to my practice of self-inquiry to do these deep dives into my thoughts throughout the day.

I’m sure there are other ways, but the most important thing here is that you begin to know your mind, to get close to it instead of running away from the parts of it you don’t like to look at.

Step 2: Trace Back Your Emotions

So, the first step of self-inquiry is getting used to seeing the thoughts that the mind produces.

Then, you can begin to trace back to thoughts from your emotional experience. You ask yourself what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. What thought sparked the dull ache in your chest? Does that thought stem from another thought? What is the story behind the thought? Is that story true?

For example, you might wake up and feel sad all day. If someone were to ask you how you feel, maybe you couldn’t put your finger on what to call it, even, or why you were feeling it. But it could be that, once you identified the emotion, if you traced back your day, you could pinpoint the moment that depressive mood arose in you.

You woke up, looked in the mirror, and saw you’d gained some weight around your middle. Five, seven pounds at most. And after observing this, you thought, without even fully processing it, “I’m so fat.” Then you went about your day.

It could be that you’re so used to this running commentary from the back of your mind that you barely noted the thought as it passed by, but if you’ve been practicing the first step, you’ll have a greater awareness of the thoughts you have. You’ll remember.

After realizing that was when the bad mood began it might occur to you that the thought wasn’t isolated. If you took a moment to sit with it you might see that the one thought “I’m so fat,” carried with it the implication “I’m not good enough,” or the conjecture “No one will ever want me,” or maybe the judgment “I’m lazy and undisciplined.”

It could be that that very same thought also carries with it a memory. Your mother constantly commented on your weight as a child or a teenager, complaining that you should go on a diet, restricting your food or berating you for whatever you did eat.

You’re not depressed because you had one negative thought. You’re depressed because packed within “I’m so fat,” is deep insecurity, implanted by your mother, that you’re unworthy and unloveable unless you lose weight.

Now…you see? Within that one thought is a whole history, an entire emotional landscape that — without self-inquiry — goes unexplored, and sits, waiting in your subconscious to crawl out of the dark and trigger you.

And it does, three weeks later when your partner asks you “are you going to finish that?” at dinner. You snap at them out of the blue and get into a vicious argument that you’re not even entirely certain you understand.

The consequence of not engaging in self-inquiry is usually our own suffering.

Step 3: Set Yourself Free

Instead of allowing the thought to become an unsuspected landmine in the field of your subconscious, you decide to unpack it. You’ve seen the thought itself, the emotions it caused, and any other thoughts that are attached.

You’ve traced the thought back to its roots, taking the time to acknowledge the pain that it caused you and understand why. Having done that work, you now know that the thought is false. It’s not based in reality, but is, instead, a construct formed from past trauma or programming.

This sets you free.

Even if the thought arises again, you’ll notice it has less power over you. It won’t cause the same level of emotional response. Why? Because you’ve seen through it. You don’t believe its story anymore.

It has no bearing on who you are and says nothing about what you’re worthy of. It’s just a thought, divorced from its depth of meaning and therefore easily disregarded.

Self-Inquiry Over Time

Some thoughts, of course, are stickier than others. Some hide themselves very well or are more difficult to find the root of. And this practice, like any other, can feel tedious at first, as you go through the painstaking process of unpacking the hidden landscape of each thought and the beliefs therein.

However, it gets easier with practice. Over time, you’ll find that the thoughts that have these ingrained beliefs systems are fewer and farther between in your mind. In some ways, just the awareness might train your mind to create less of them.

This happened in my case. Most(though, not all) of my thoughts, these days, are functional. They’re about how I’m going to the grocery store or when I’m going to shower. They don’t contain within them these histories or self-judgments.

You’ll also find that, over time, the process is sped up. So where at the start of this practice it might take you an hour to move through the processing of one thought, after some time, doing the same could take less than a minute. That’s the amazing thing about awareness. The more aware you become, the easier it is to see through illusion.

The active practice of self-inquiry does more to clear away limiting beliefs than a simple meditative practice could. It’s not enough to see the mind and allow it, we have to know it in its totality, see all its constructs and break them down.

This, in turn, frees up our minds to be the powerful tools they are made to be, tools to help us move toward what lights us up, and help us create the experiences we want in life.

If you have to choose just one daily spiritual practice, to me, this is the most important.

❤

If you’d like to talk more about awakening, feel free to drop a comment! I love chatting down there. And if you’re interested in catching other things I write, you can become a Medium member here. XO