RASTAL

Shifting & Inquiry

After settling into your baseline experience through Sinking In, the Shifting & Inquiry cycle guides you to discover and stabilize deeper aspects of fundamental wellbeing. This is a two-part process where Shifting helps you discover new experiences, and Inquiry helps integrate them.

How it works

  1. Shifting - guides you to discover what lies beneath your current experience
  2. Inquiry - helps stabilize the new experience through conscious awareness
  3. Brief return to Sinking In before beginning another cycle

A typical session includes 2-4 complete cycles, with each cycle taking roughly 15-20 minutes.

Shifting Process

(pause ~15-30 seconds between each step)

  1. As you continue to breathe, allow yourself to gently begin to lower down through the experience, letting each breath take you deeper and deeper, lower and lower, downwards through the experience. All without any effort on your part, just watching and observing as that lowering happens.

  2. As you continue to lower gently downwards through the experience, allow yourself to notice what shows up beneath the current experience. Maybe there's a stillness beneath the stillness, or it opens up subtly, or maybe it's something completely different and unexpected. Whatever it is, and however it happens to arise, just allow yourself to notice that without any judgment, and gently connect with that experience.

  3. With every breath, allow any new qualities or new experience to gradually take up more and more of your awareness. And allow the previous experience to begin to fade gently into the background.

  4. As you continue to breathe and gently lower through the experiences, allow any new qualities to continue to grow until eventually they take up all of your awareness, as the previous experience fades completely out of view. All without any effort on your part, just observing as this unfolds.

  5. With every breath, allow your system to settle more and more into this experience, to stabilize deeper and deeper into this new perspective. Allow yourself to gradually and gently come to rest here, until being here is just as easy and effortless as breathing.

  6. Once you feel settled and stable, you can gently wiggle your fingers and toes, allowing the movement to come from a place of this experience.

  7. If it feels right, and once you feel ready, you can gradually and gently open your eyes, inviting the experience into everything you see, into everything you hear, and inviting it into all of your senses.

Note: At step 2, the suggestions can vary. Some other examples:

  • Maybe there's a more subtle version of your current experience
  • Maybe some bodily sensations arise or disappear
  • Maybe it's just "this," with no particular qualities to it

Inquiry Process

Once you feel stable in the new experience, Inquiry helps integrate it more fully through gentle investigation. Rather than just having a deep experience that fades when you return to daily life, this systematic exploration helps ground the new perspective.

What it explores

Inquiry examines various aspects of your experience such as:

  • Cognition
  • Emotions
  • Sense of self
  • Relationship with time
  • Bodily sensations

How it works

Through careful questioning, you're guided to notice specific aspects of your experience that may have changed. This engagement helps to:

  • Stabilize the shift by bringing awareness to it
  • Ground the experience through verbal articulation
  • Create a clearer understanding of your current perspective
  • Support integration into daily life

For the specific questions used in this process, see the Inquiry Questions.

After Each Cycle

After completing Inquiry, return to a brief Sinking In (1-2 minutes) to reconnect with fundamental wellbeing before beginning another cycle of Shifting & Inquiry.

If at any point you notice: