What are your beautiful and deepening questions?
Image by Anahata Giri
What does a question open up inside us?
As we approach the New Year, I am enjoying solitude and circling around the deeper questions bubbling under the surface. Culturally, it is a time for setting intentions, but I would like to offer here a potent alternative, a practice of discovering your unique and emergent questions, what I refer to as beautiful or deepening questions. A question is a seed that we plant in the fertile soil of our own psyche, in the fertile darkness of the unknown and in the fertile field of co-emergence with the world.
What will grow from my seed questions? What is emerging?
Below I share the details of a stream of consciousness process, designed to help you access intuitive, imaginal, subliminal, liminal realms of the deeper self and even of the larger field-resonance of life. For more than ten years I have personally explored this deepening questions practice and shared it with participants at the start of a retreat, circle or mentoring process. Alongside whatever I am teaching or guiding, I want participants’ own questions to be foremost in their inquiry, as fertile ground and as a trustworthy guide for their journey. I trust in the questions that arise from our depths. The poet David Whyte says: ”Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation."
What are the questions that I am following in my life, whether I am aware of them or not? What is ready, in a ready-not-ready sort of a way?
I am not talking here about generic or planning kinds of questions such as: what are your goals for this year? This kind of question has its place, but tends to bring forth the rational, strategic mind which is often habituated or conditioned. Entering the slightly altered and dream-like space of continuous writing and of streaming consciousness, can help you attune to the underneath of your rational mind, to uncover liminal, just-below-the-surface insight.
There is no “trying” to come up with profound questions. You simply write what comes through, including the mundane or silly questions or resistant comments (What will I have for lunch? Is this even going anywhere??). We allow and include the critical or wandering mind. This deep permission for all and any questions opens up a field of play, creativity, spontaneity and multiplicity. Deepening questions are queens of multiplicity! You will notice that there is not one answer to a deepening question, but many possible answers, including undreamed of possibilities that are beyond our conscious knowing.
What is beckoning? What do I trust in?
I trust questions. Questions can evoke beginnings, endings, journeys, adventure, quests, new paths, deepening paths and profound savouring of what is and what is emerging. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Once again, words from David Whyte: "The ability to ask beautiful questions often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it, as it does by having it answered.” He also says: "One of the most beautifull disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true…"
Is this story that I tell about my life actually true?
What is fumbling, tumbling, grumbling, rumbling from inside the cave, and now stepping towards the entrance, blinking in the daylight?
Some of the deepening questions that arise are universal questions. However, this practice also helps you find your own exquisitely unique, quirky, highly personalised questions. In fact, you might find questions that only you are asking of the world. These questions are attuned to a unique time and place and to your unique relationship with your inner world and with the outer world. Whatever it is that your life has been leading you towards, a question can help ripen the next steps of that journey.
These kinds of questions are magical creatures that bring unexpected gifts for ourselves and for the world. Deepening questions can be potent, transformative, powerfully alluring and, I will admit, they can also be terrifying. We all want transformation but when we find the question that beckons transformation in, we are stretched and opened into the unknown path of possibility and change. This can be scary as well as wondrous. We need courage and strength to be with these deepening questions.
What is this moment - just as it is - showing me, when I do not fix, resist, analyse or transcend it? What does a question open up inside me?
A question arises from a sense of not-knowing. When we ‘know’ we tend to see through the filter of what we know and this can prevent the unexpected, the not-seen, the discovery or the truly emergent ‘something’ to enter. Our knowing can become a defence against the world. A question places us at the edge of our knowing, on the brink of the fertile unknown.
This is not a heady process. We are not solely thinking our way through this process. Although we are writing, we are drawing on all modes of perception as we write. Alongside thinking, we draw on the sensations we feel in our own body, our embodied felt sense, awareness, intuition, deep imagination, emotions, the unconscious, numinous experiences and life experiences in relationship with the world around us.
A question is invitational, not demanding. A question opens up inside us a way of being that is receptive, open, engaging and willing. We are inviting in - and being invited into - something we do not quite know yet. Being with our deepening questions positions us in a relationship with life based on humility and curiosity.
What is the source of these beautiful questions? Do the questions come from beyond and then we catch them? Do we simply need to listen and the questions will come?
Deepening questions arise from our embodied and felt experience as incantation, prayer, path, compass, portal or threshold. Deep questions can be a form of prayer that bring us into relationship with the mysterious unfolding of sacred life, in whatever way the words ‘sacred life’ resonate for you. You might call this sacred life: presence, mystery, spirit, God, Goddess, nature, life, love. Deep questions arise from profound reciprocity and entanglement with all of life: we ask so that we can participate more deeply with life; life gives and asks more of us.
How will I live my questions? How will I participate in this world that I love?
What are your beautiful and deepening questions?
Do you dare to speak the questions that rise up inside you? Can you resist answering them too soon, but instead, as Rilke suggests, can you live the questions? Can you carry your beautiful, deepening questions as incantation, prayer, path, compass, portal or threshold?
Practice: Stream of Consciousness Writing: What Are Your Beautiful and Deepening Questions?
Stream of consciousness writing is a process designed to go underneath habituated thinking to bring forth spontaneous, fresh discoveries and insights. As you write freely, you enter a liminal space, giving deep permission for a spontaneous and free stream of consciousness to be expressed.
Write in a quiet place (which could be at home or in nature) where you will not be interrupted. The invitation is to write spontaneously, freely, without stopping. Keep your pen moving, in response to the prompt. This can be done with any prompt but the prompt here is: What are my beautiful, deepening questions? What are the questions most meaningful to my life right now? Or you can follow your own variation of this question.
Begin by writing your question. Then, without pausing and without any censoring or editing at all, start brainstorming a long list of any and all questions that arise. If you get stuck write your beginning question again. You might find that criticism or a mundane question might pop in (what will I have for lunch?). It is key to the process to give full permission for whatever to arise to arise, as this helps us, in time, to access a flow, a stream of insight and discovery. Sometimes nonsensical or silly questions pop in. Great, allow that too. This can be a sign that you are cracking through habituated ways of thinking and being. Write for 5-30 minutes. You might find insights after one session, or you might need to do this over several days. At your timing, there might be one question that emerges to guide you with its wisdom.
As always with liminal practices, this practice can set in motion a subliminal process within you, in relationship with the world, so stay tuned for synchronicities, numinous encounters, attuned life experiences or other questions that might pop in at random times.
Anahata Giri
New Years Eve, 2025.
At the start of each year, places open up for the Wild Soul Immersion - an online six month immersion, exploring the unfolding deeper story of your soul-self using experiential practices at home/in nature and within the supportive container of a small, intimate circle. The primary influence for this circle is the work of Animas Valley Institute/Bill Plotkin and the story/archetypal work of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, alongside a synthesis of 30 years of inner work including embodiment/felt sense practice, heart-practice, dream work, story, creative expression, activism and nature communion. New and seasoned soul path walkers welcome.
You can also do the Wild Soul Immersion one to one, integrating the 12 modules with 12 one to one mentoring sessions.
For those who live in Melbourne, Australia, I offer the Becoming Soul Circle, for women only. This circle now includes the full Wild Soul Immersion 12 modules and 60+ practices for your own practice, alongside the Sunday afternoon group sessions.