What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Free Article
Living the Question
In the last couple of articles, we’ve been exploring inquiry: what it means and how to integrate it into your life.
To some extent, inquiry is a mental activity. The process of asking questions, even deep questions about beliefs and feelings, naturally engages your mind as you think about the answer.
There’s another aspect to inquiry, however, which is perhaps even more important: living the question instead of just thinking about it. In living the question, you start to find deeper truths and experience deeper shifts. And living the question begins when you recognize that how you’ve been doing, trying, struggling ... just isn’t working.
Have you noticed how even when you mentally understand something — for instance, that your beliefs aren’t always true — your behavior and feelings don’t necessarily change? That often leads to internal arguments — your mind versus your feelings. And that leads to frustration and self-criticism, as you wonder why you’re not making changes despite your logical understanding.
When you live the question, you naturally go deeper, beyond the thought process. As the question integrates into your emotions, body, and being, the answers are felt. They remain nonverbal, and are therefore far more likely to allow natural shifts in your beliefs and in the actions that arise from your beliefs. This is very different from trying to impose change logically or through an act of will.
But we’re taught from childhood to attack problems and situations from a mental perspective. We’re taught to think about them, to work at figuring things out, to solve puzzles logically.
So how can you get out of that deeply-ingrained mental response and allow yourself to live the question instead? Here are a few suggestions.
Feel your answers
The key is to start with questions that tap into your feelings as well as your logic, and then to allow yourself to feel the answers as well as thinking about them.
As I mentioned in the last article, The Gentle Art of Inquiry, inquiry is best begun when you’re in the midst of struggle. From that perspective, you’re already engaged with how you feel.
Now, as you work through the process of inquiry, feel what arises in you, without analyzing or judging. Where do the questions seem to land in your body? What layers of emotion come up for you?
Living the question means committing to deeply engaging with and exploring what’s most real and important for you. As you feel your way into your inquiry, notice that the resonance and depth of the answers that arise are directly proportional to the level of your attention to and desire for what’s true for you.
(To review the process and the questions, see the articles: A Doorway to Freedom and The Gentle Art of Inquiry. For another look at understanding what’s most important and true for you, see the article What’s Important)
Investigate experience over time
The real heart of living the question is allowing yourself to feel over time.
We’re taught that a question is supposed to have an immediate answer. But living the question, or living with the question, is a process that intentionally doesn’t expect a specific, final answer right away.
Instead, take the question with you as you go about your day. As you move through experiences, inquire with curiosity. How does the experience that you’re having right now change when you look at it through the lens of your inquiry?
What if ...
My clients often find it useful to experiment with questions that invite them to explore new options for how they act, think, and feel.
I want to be very clear that this doesn’t mean trying to logically convince yourself to change your thoughts or feelings. As I’ve said many times, you can’t create enduring, effective change through willpower or “shoulds.”
However, as we’re exploring in these articles, you can use inquiry to allow your thoughts and feelings to shift naturally.
Living with “what if” questions is a powerful way of extending the basic process of inquiry and taking it deeper.
For example: what if you stopped arguing with your mind?
What is it like to allow everything to be as it is?
What if, in this moment, you were able to stop struggling?
Personalize the question according to what you’re engaged with. For instance, one of my clients has had an ongoing struggle with vulnerability. For her, truth — in this case, the truth of who she is — is deeply important. And so for the last few weeks, she’s been living the powerful question, “What is it like here and now to simply be all of who I am, without barriers or masks?”
The way the question is phrased feels to her like an invitation to experiment. That allows her to shift gradually, to relax into a natural expression of herself.
She’s told me that she's felt strong feelings of fear and self-doubt on occasion, despite the gentleness of the invitation. Yet she also told me — with delight and joy in her voice — ”When I just relax with it, it’s so simple, and there’s such a sense of freedom!“
And that’s the true power of living the question.
“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” Ranier Maria Rilke, 1876-1926, German poet and author
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