Awareness, Relationship, and Inquiry

By Amma Thanasanti

Recently, someone asked me if I looked forward to an inquiry group meeting I attend every month.

I found myself answering, “It depends. When I know I want to do inquiry, yes. But even when I don’t think I have a specific thing I want to inquire into, I respect it enormously.

The word I used was respect.

Not enjoy. Not like. Respect.

That conversation led me to ask a question I’ve lived with for decades but had never quite articulated this clearly:

What is inquiry, actually?

I want to share what I’ve come to understand, not as something settled or complete, but as something I’m still discovering. I’d love for you to come along and see if any of it resonates with your own experience.

Many people think inquiry means talking about your experience. Or processing emotions. Or telling your story. Or thinking out loud until something makes sense. Those are all real and valuable things people do together. But when I use the word inquiry, I mean something more specific, and I’d like to show you what, with a few actual examples, rather than just describe it in the abstract.

Three Ways I’ve Learned to Practice It

Repeating Questions. Two people sit together. One asks the other the same question, again and again, for a set amount of time (say, six minutes). Something like, “Tell me a way you make yourself small?” or “Who are you?” Each time there is a response, the listener simply says “thank you” and asks again. No follow-up, no commentary. What I noticed the first time I did this: by the fifth or sixth repetition, my clever answers ran out, and something less rehearsed started to surface. The repetition wears down the part of me that’s performing an answer.

Monologue. One person speaks without interruption while others simply listen, not to respond, not to fix, not even to understand in the ordinary sense, but to be present with what’s being shared. I’ve found that just knowing I’m being met this way changes what I’m willing to say. Things come out that I didn’t know were there until someone was listening.

Cyclonic. A group sits in a circle (or, on Zoom, self-selects into a rotating order), and each person offers a brief response to a shared question before it passes to the next. Around it goes, again and again, for the time available. I love this one because it lets you hear yourself answer the same question multiple times as the conversation shifts around you, and often my second or third answer is truer than my first.

These are only three of several forms I’ve practiced over the years, but they’ve taught me the most about what inquiry is: direct contact with experience.

I want to be clear about something here: I can do inquiry on my own, and have, many times. It can be genuinely powerful. But when I do it with others, inside a field of non-judgmental attention, something else becomes possible. It’s as if the attention of the other person or people potentizes my own attention and awareness, makes it stronger, more available, so that I start to see things I couldn’t see alone. Not because solo inquiry is lesser, but because being met changes what becomes visible.

Here’s what I mean, concretely. One evening I came to an inquiry session with my neck and shoulder stiff, tension that had been chronic for weeks. I almost didn’t do inquiry that night; I didn’t think inquiry could do anything for muscle tension. But on a whim, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try. What opened up was a structure underneath the tension, something I hadn’t been able to see on my own, no matter how much attention I’d already put on that shoulder. Once I could see the structure, the tension itself began to soften around it. What made that possible wasn’t just my own attention. It was a skilled facilitator gently directing my attention toward what was happening. That’s what I mean by potentized attention: something became available to me that simply wasn’t available without someone else’s presence.

This also points to a distinction worth naming: peer practice is when two or more peers do inquiry together, without a designated facilitator. Small Group is facilitated: someone trained in asking the kinds of questions that support inquiry as it unfolds is guiding the process. Both are real inquiry. They’re just not the same thing, and each makes certain things possible that the other doesn’t.

Why Safety Isn’t a Nice-to-Have

I used to think of safety as a supportive backdrop to inquiry, helpful, but secondary to the “real” work. I don’t think that anymore.

Here’s what I’ve come to see: so much of what inquiry is reaching for, the beliefs, the protective strategies, the ways we learned to survive, didn’t form in isolation. They formed in relationship, often before we had any capacity to evaluate what we were absorbing. Which means, in my experience, that a lot of it can’t be uncovered through self-reflection alone. It has to be met by someone else. Not advised. Not interpreted. Not fixed. Just met.

But we can only let ourselves be met like that if it feels safe to do so. This is why, at Awakening Truth, we’ve built out real guidelines rather than just trusting that “safety” would take care of itself. A few of the ones I lean on most:

• Confidentiality. What’s shared stays where it’s shared. If I want to follow up with someone later about something they said, I ask permission first.
• Permission to pause. If I notice I feel less safe in the moment, I can stop. I only share what I’m actually at ease sharing, nothing is owed beyond that.
• Speaking from my own experience, not advice. I try to speak from my heart and what’s happening for me, and not to hand out advice unless someone’s specifically asked for it.
• No blame, no shame, toward myself or anyone else.

I share these not as rules to memorize, but because I’ve felt, firsthand, what a difference they make. When I know I won’t be interrupted or judged, and when I know what I say won’t leave the room, I can let my guard down enough for something new to surface. Without that container, I mostly just perform a version of myself I’ve already rehearsed. With it, I’ve been surprised by what shows up.

What Happens When It’s Safe Enough

Here’s something I’ve noticed, again and again: when that safety is present, whether someone else is holding it for me, or I’ve learned to hold it for myself, I stop organizing around protection. And the moment protection relaxes, even slightly, I start to see things I couldn’t see a moment before. A strategy I didn’t know I was running. An assumption I didn’t know I was making. It’s not that I find better answers. It’s that the way I’m seeing the question itself starts to shift.

That’s the whole game, as far as I can tell. Inquiry isn’t primarily about finding answers. It’s about letting perception itself reorganize.

I want to be honest that this isn’t something I can prove to you. It’s something I’ve experienced enough times that I’ve come to trust it. I offer it to you the way a friend might tell you about a trail they love: not because I need you to believe me, but because I think you might find something about it interesting too.

Meditation and Inquiry, Side by Side

Over the years, I’ve found that meditation and inquiry have shown me different things.

Meditation, for me, started with learning to gather and steady attention, to notice experience instead of just being swept along by it. Over time, it began revealing qualities of mind that felt innate, not manufactured by effort, just uncovered by it. That’s let me know something about my own essence. I’ve come to think of what meditation reveals less as wholeness, and more as freedom, a direct taste of what I am underneath all the activity.

Here’s what that’s looked like for me. For most of my life, I avoided a feeling of being hollow at my core, what I’ve come to call deficient emptiness. When I finally had the capacity to turn toward it instead of away from it, I found it wasn’t deficient at all. It was full. Luminous presence. I felt like the exile was over. I was home. That was freedom.

Wholeness, in my experience, comes from somewhere else: from releasing the conditions that obscure my ability to access what’s already innate. That’s where inquiry has done its work. It hasn’t shown me what awareness is so much as how my own experience got organized, through old beliefs, protective habits, ways of relating I learned before I had any say in the matter. Meditation let me touch the freedom that was already here. Inquiry has helped me clear away what kept blocking my access to it. Neither practice would be enough on its own.

Here’s an example of how inquiry works. I was once doing inquiry about a relationship I had with someone I cared about, who tended to mention only the things I’d done wrong. Whenever I thought of her, I felt myself contract, becoming small. Working with it in an inquiry session, I saw something I hadn’t expected: I had the same tendency, in myself, of seeing only what was negative in others. Oscillating between the two (what she did to me, and what I did to others), something shifted. I stopped feeling small when I thought of my friend. That was wholeness: not a feeling arriving from nowhere, but a condition releasing.

What I Came to Understand

Early in my own practice, a teacher once asked me, “Do you understand the purpose of Small Group? It isn’t to like it, or the people in it, or to feel close with anyone. It’s for inquiry.”

Years later, in a group where we were doing inquiry about inquiry itself, several people admitted they only showed up because it was required. Something in me blurted out: “I’d welcome people doing inquiry. But whether or not they do, I’m not going to let that stop me from doing my own.”

I still care about safety, and about whether a particular group makes inquiry easier or harder. Some do, genuinely, more than others. But that moment showed me something: once I got clear on what I was there to practice, the conditions around me still matter. They just don’t have the final word anymore.

One Word, Many Practices

I’ve noticed that many of us use the same word, inquiry, for very different things.

One person comes wanting to process. Another to be understood. Another to connect. Another to think out loud.

All deeply human. All valuable. None of them quite what I mean by inquiry.

For me, the purpose isn’t self-expression. It’s discovery, not discovery that bends experience to fit what I already believe, but discovery that lets experience reorganize what I believe. That distinction matters to me, not because one way is right and the other wrong, but because I’ve found that without some shared clarity about the purpose, people can sit in the very same room doing entirely different things and wonder later why it didn’t land the way they hoped.

Why I Keep Coming Back to It

I trust inquiry, not because it belongs to one tradition, not because it’s intellectually elegant, but because it’s shown me, over and over, the specific conditions that keep me from living from what’s already innate.

Meditation gave me a taste of freedom I couldn’t have manufactured through effort. Inquiry has helped me release what stood between me and the wholeness of living from it.

I don’t experience one as more important than the other. I’ve needed both.

The quality of the group still matters to me, and probably always will. But when there’s enough safety, inside me and around me, I no longer need everyone else in the room to share my reasons for being there.

Repeatedly, I’ve found that the deepest shifts don’t come from better answers. They come from staying with what’s here long enough for the way I’m seeing it to change.

That’s what I keep coming back for. And if any part of this resonates, I’d love for you to come try one of these forms yourself