An in-depth overview of InnerSense
By Dr Graham Mead
InnerSense is a grounded, authentic approach to regaining an intuitive sense of who we are and ending the outer search for inner peace. It offers a lucid, practical, non-philosophical pathway to inner work and embodied self-awareness. The program inspires and shapes a conscious, purpose-imbued life and restores harmony to the relationship we have with ourselves, those around us, objects and circumstance and most of all with change and impermanence. The work initiates a shift in the fundamental paradigm that governs our perception and experience of ourselves and our world and encourages us to return to a state of inner, intuitive, felt-awareness. This gently moves us from the conditioned idea of ‘who’ we should be to the ever-changing sense of ‘what’ we are.
This shift is accomplished through reactivating our ability to feel our feelings, which include, but are not limited to our emotions. InnerSense is therefore not focused on an outcome, results or a premeditated constructed process, because regaining authentic inner awareness is not an act, we can't try to do it. Rather, it is the experience of immersing ourselves in whatever is in our experience at any given moment and embracing that. Living it, feeling it and remaining consciously present through it. This way we incrementally break down our unconscious, conditioned reactivity to life and gradually replace the idea of who we should be with a dynamic sense of what we are.
Consider the world of a 1 year old child who is so utterly engrossed in their own body and experience that there is little need for comparison or judgment. The child has an intimate sense of being. It feels, therefore it is. At this early stage it has no concept of comparison, it has not yet become thought obsessed and is innocently free. As adults we think, compare and then try to be, exerting enormous effort to become what we mentally think we should be, based on the assessment we have made of our surroundings, the expectations of others and the constant reactive comparison that ensues. In this way we gradually lose all 'sense' of who we are and replace it with an idea, a construct, an abstraction. It seems quite absurd that while generally considering ourselves rational people, we have such an irrational approach to what is real and actual. We intellectualise and replace an awareness of feeling what is actual and real in a given moment, with a story, an idea, a conceptual interpretation and then call that dealing with our feelings. We try to “build" our confidence, “develop” our self-esteem, achieve and acquire so that we can at least appear to be fulfilled in the world in an attempt to overcome the deep sense of inadequacy most of us feel every day.
InnerSense provides a context within which to experience and begin to embrace our awareness of our inner world. Through the use of simple, yet profoundly effective tools, we can initiate a process of discovery that will free us from any further searching outside of ourselves for inner peace. We can experience a new way of perceiving and being in our world that can be applied practically to daily life. Some of us may call this a spiritual journey or search, which often leads to a philosophical discussion as to its validity and initiates intellectualisation of our felt experience. None of this is required.
InnerSense is not offering a philosophical (mental) view of life, it is simply offering an entry point to seeing reality as it is. We are not trying to "create a different reality" as this leads to more delusion as we mentally try to figure out what we want from the world and how to get it or make it come to us. There is no longterm benefit to these approaches as they make absolutely no lasting impact on our inner world and are the result of a deluded, though popular perception that by changing our environment we can effectively and consistently change how we think and feel.
By learning how to simply pay deep attention to what is actually happening within us, we are discarding our perspective and judgement of our reality and exchanging it for a direct experience of what is occurring. What we really are, our true nature cannot be described or thought. Thinking is not required here. Thinking is a product of the brain that is directed at the past and the imagined future and is essential in order to live and function in the world. However, when we are attempting to find harmony in the quality of our experience, the moment there is thought, we are trapped. Thought is the origin of psychological time and our predicament, our emotional and sensory imbalance, lies in the present. Consider the possibility that there is no place for thought in inner work. The only way we can change the inner world is by being still with it, by feeling it. Thinking here only creates further confusion through conceptualisation and abstraction, opinion and belief, an insistence on understanding and explaining the stories that have led to our emotional upset and a desire to move towards something else that appears to be better than what we are currently experiencing. This is madness.
Our relationship with ourself and others forms a pivotal role in this work. Appreciating the purpose of relationship and approaching it with increasing self-responsibility is crucial to this work both as an unfaltering trigger for our unconscious reactivity as well as a feedback mechanism for whatever realisations we have actually embodied. By providing a context for exploring our feelings at an intimate level of our being, we can safely regain the ability to be in our lives without the fear of feeling our feelings. We can embrace our life circumstances and the sensations they initiate as exactly where we need to be right now to grow and evolve emotionally. We are learning to be with what is real, because until we can be with what is real, we have no hope of any part of our experience actually changing. A delusion cannot be made real through thinking or hoping or believing. Similarly, fear cannot dissolve through these approaches. Fear can only dissolve when we are willing to feel it and are no longer trying to suppress it, control it or distract ourselves from it. As the structure of fear begins to dissolve, we gradually give up trying to change anything in our outer world, because we directly experience our outer world changing spontaneously in relation to our inner world.
This change evidently manifests equally in the physical body as it does mentally and emotionally while we move toward overall natural balance and vitality. Although change is palpable from the moment we start, the journey is ongoing and can be profoundly challenging as we uncover deep patterns of unconscious conditioning, reactivity and discomfort.
Intimate experiential observation through stillness, standing akasha, breath-work and relational exercises allows InnerSense to guide us through the integration of deep-seated, suppressed emotional and sensory memory, ending the fear of feeling our feelings and reconnecting us to our Aliveness, our shared essence- the intelligence that animates us, lives in our cells and breathes our bodies.
Let’s begin…
