EPUS 2-4

Part II: Ending Your Patterns of Unnecessary Suffering

Inquiry Questions

Take 5 to 10 minutes to answer each of these questions. Don’t edit yourself or judge your responses.

This is just for you. No-one is reading your answers, and you don’t need to show them to anyone. Your responses will be saved for you when you go to the next page, or when you choose “save progress” below, so you can always come back and add to them or change them as your experience shifts. You will receive a copy of your replies via email. If you would rather take this offline, you can download a pdf.

Give yourself the safety of your own personal private inquiry. In this moment, what are you feeling emotionally? Allow your attention to go directly into that emotion, whatever it may be. It may be anger, fear, or sadness. It may be despair. Be willing to go underneath that. Get under the emotion to discover what else is here, underneath it.

If you’re not aware of a particular emotion, is there any feeling in your chest or your belly or your throat that you could actually get closer to, that you could enter or open to? There’s no correct answer, you just simply start where you are. Whatever you are feeling is the beginning of your inquiry.

If you’re not feeling anything in this moment, is there a memory you have that generates or evokes a particular emotion? Let yourself have that memory. What emotion arises from the memory? Is it possible in this moment, to put the remembered story aside and go inside that emotion? If you are still unaware of any feeling ask yourself, "What is underneath the numbness or blankness?

This completes Part II of Ending Patterns of Unnecessary Suffering.

“All fixated patterns are an avoidance of fear.”