Site icon Mark L Lockwood | Mental Health Transformation Cape Town

Loving Inquiry

The practice of Loving Inquiry for healing & Life Transformation 

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This work, the practice of Loving Inquiry for healing & Life Transformation designed by Mark L Lockwood  has been designed as a way shower. It is a close companion, a highly spiritual and wise friend who you can walk with towards authenticity and to the love of life. Whenever I am confused, fearful or suffering I can turn inwards and do the work of Loving Inquiry. 

Where does Fear come from?

Mark often says that all anxiety is separation anxiety. Fear is the idea that you are separate from love. Fear creates emotional states that do not exist and in turn these create pain and suffering that we experience in our lives. Fear is known as False evidence appearing real because the nature of fear does not exist. This non-existent emotion we can call a dream state rather than reality. It is a state created by your frightened personality to keep you safe from all the monsters that lurk under your bed at night. 

“All attachments to the dream state are made of energy. That energy is called emotion. All emotions, positive and negative, are attachments. Humans are emotion-based creatures and all emotions derive their energy from one core emotion; fear. Fear cannot be confronted or slain because it is fear of nothing, of no-self. The desire to slay fear is itself a fear-based emotion. Fear can only be surrendered to; the thing feared, entered. You can spend your life hacking away at the million-headed hydra of attachment and never make any progress, or you can follow emotional energy back to its source, its lair, and see Leviathan, enemy of light, for what it really is: Your heart.” – Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

How do we heal from fear?

In order to heal we need to move from separation to integration. In this way we no longer fragment and project but rather face our fears and in doing so dissolve them. Fear is by nature false evidence appearing real. Fear can appear real and it can feel, look and taste real but it is not necessarily true. This is where the process of Loving Inquiry becomes useful. We need to question what we think, feel and believe. This is how we heal. We heal by allowing the truth to set us free. 

Loving Inquiry teaches us that fear can only be surrendered to. We find the courage (heart) to surrender and accept when we stay emotionally open and heart-brain coherent. We literally slay the dragon with the emotion of love by asking ourselves what we are thinking we believe and then we do the contemplative questioning work of examining our belief systems to look for thinking-errors. Examples of these can be he is a bad father, I dislike all immigrants, woman are bad drivers, she died way too young, he will never amount to anything and she never let’s me get a word in. Only when we examine these beliefs will we be sure that we are not falling prey to false beliefs that create our pain and suffering in the world. 

“Wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Led to believe a lie

Loving Inquiry suggests a belief is a thought we have over and over again and the scientific journal last year stated that up to 50% of our memories are false and untrue. That is a massive number. Another psychological study with over 400 participants in ‘memory implantation’ studies had fictitious autobiographical events suggested to them – and it was found that around 50% of the participants believed, to some degree, that they had experienced those events.

Consider that the Nazi’s thought the Jews were evil and inferior and were fearful they would take over their country. A mass extermination followed. Palestinians and Israelis are taught from an early age to gear each other and deep hated for each other is the emotional result. Yet when experiments have put the two groups of teens together, the love dissipates instantly, along with the fear and the lie they were led to believe about their neighbour. In South Africa we had the ridiculous ideas of racism which became apartheid. Fake news is built on fear and is common place today. Fear also breeds lies that make us gender biased, classist and racist and the list goes on and on. Yet, none of this is our true nature.

The world wars were Cain and Able all over again. Brother killing brother and we are still doing it today because of the lies of separation we believe. When we stop the separation fear of the other disintegrates. That is how you win world wars and end racism and that is how you cure anxiety. It is all the same. It is always a return to authenticity, connection and love. This is the work of Loving Inquiry. 

The emotions of separation leading to fear:

A return to love with save the world

When we remember who we are the insanity stops. The overthinking of survival mind stops and we stop acting like monkeys shining through the trees. 

Loving Inquiry stops us dead in our tracks before thoughts become things. It allows us to stop and use our Contemplative Intelligence (CQ) to question our thinking to make sure we are not believing a lie. The mind is biased to believe lies. We have defence mechanisms, cognitive distortions, false memories and we impulsively fall prey to projection. This we call the contemplative pause or the 3 second rule. Taking 3 seconds before you answer or commit to something with a yes or a no can be the change that changes everything. In the same way when we question our thoughts we are literally guided by the power of Truth. 

When we return to love we find inner peace. Healing begins in the body-heart-mind. The peace we experience on the inside becomes how we see the world on the outside and our harsh judgments of the other begin to melt away. Remembering who I am requires me to ask who I am without the stories in mind that I am believing. 

The emotions of healing leading to Love:

Tara Brach says that we need to distinguish between Real But Not True  to free ourselves from harmful beliefs. She suggests that “thoughts and beliefs are navigational maps that are not inherently true. Rather, some serve us and others cause feelings of separation, self-aversion and/or blame of others. We can free ourselves from harmful beliefs by investigating them with a dedicated, mindful and courageous presence.” 

Practicing Loving Inquiry 

One of the ways we practice loving inquiry is through writing it down. Opening a Loving Inquiry and getting your true, sacred self, unhindered by the personality to respond to the inquiry you are compassionately making will set you free. When I am not running a life that is dictated to me by the environment (people, places, things, conversation, situations and events) I am truly free! 

  1. Self-Awareness. When you become mindful that you are stressed, anxious, fearful or in pain. When you sense something you become self-aware and know that there is work to do. 
  2. Self-Discipline. The Contemplative Pause. Is what I am believing true? The one is mightier than the sword. Write it down in real-time (real-ity). My thought is…….it makes me feel…..I want to do…….I am convinced I believe that……
  3. Self-Inquiry. What will happen if I start to think that……if I start to feel that…….I will do this……the real consequence for me will be………
  4. Self-Connection. Remember who you are. List 5 values and 5 deeper emotions (dig if you have to, use our emotions wheel). 
  5. Self-Reflection. He/She/They are doing/have done/will do………because I judge them harshly.
  6. Self-Love. I am a (your best values)………..person who can choose compassion for………..because they have done their best even though I don’t like it. I don’t want to feel the way this makes me feel which is…………so I choose to feel…………because without this story in my body-heart-mind I am………….. and free! What other people do no longer imprisons me. 

Another way we practice Loving Inquiry is by stopping first. Whenever you become self-aware practice stopping. It halts the behaviour chain of events that keep getting you the same poor results in its tracks. Take a deep breath, a contemplative pause, and don’t take anything or anyone in your environment personally because once that way of being made you feel powerless. They don’t have that much power over you. 

When they stay free I stay free. Staying fearless in my believing is to experience profound freedom. Expectations are always on their way to becoming resentments so don’t judge or expect anything from others because we will start to believe lies through projection. As the Paradigm Process teaches us. Learn to go of your need to control and return to self-love through Loving Inquiry. 

What is my business? Loving Inquiry is my business!

GOD – Environment/circumstances (weather, external events, etc.) = NOT your business

SELF – Your thoughts, feelings and behaviours = IS your business 

OTHER – Other people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours = NOT your business

The practice of Loving Inquiry for healing & Life Transformation is one of the practices we teach in the Paradigm Process which is an incredible 10 step process that takes you out of the prison of personality and into reality where you live a life from authentic self which we call your Sacred Self. People heal everything from depression, burnout and relationship trouble through to addictions, personality disorders and all sorts of problems with pain, trauma and suffering. The Center for Healing and Life transformation in South Africa is where we provide inpatient retreats for our clients from 2-12 weeks. You can find more information here and work in-person or online. Namaste. 

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