Owning Your Story with Self-Inquiry

By Jade Moyano

In the age of self-help, wellness trends, packaged holistic healing, and westernized shamanism, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin the process of becoming conscious. If you stop and listen, you can hear the hum, the pull to leap into a life more this and less that. How do we know what works and what is actually for us when surrounded by a saturated market that over promises without getting anywhere near the core truth of humanity? Healing is a business today. So, in my opinion, we need to go back to basics.

To declutter my mind and be crystal clear in a world that makes it impossible to see straight, I turn to Self-Inquiry. Self-Inquiry sounds self-explanatory but it’s actually much more complex and multi-layered than we may think. So much of the work I do with Intuitive Writing during our Trust and Travel retreats has to do with telling the truth. So does Self-Inquiry. It's easy to think of the truth as objective, verifiable, factual. But when it comes down to writing, we lean heavily on the subjective nature of truth, which is feeling and perspective based. 

Finding the truth about who we are as individuals in order to get to the core of ourselves and our stories is a lifelong process. Yet, there are a lot of tools we can use to achieve greater understanding of who we are at this very moment. Self-Inquiry has been transformational to me in this journey, and it has helped me gain clarity to begin writing my first memoir. 

Back in 2019 I developed the Owning Your Story workshop, a 2 hour long writing session where I guide writers to dig deep into their intentions, their memories, and fears in order to get to the core of their authentic story. It’s the most healing session we have on retreat. I knew nothing about Self-Inquiry then. What I did know is that it’s really hard to be yourself through the process of sharing your story, to stay humble, to tell the truth, and to commit to authenticity during such a vulnerable practice. So I began my own process of inquiring about myself, without knowing how much I could find in the way. 

This is where Louie Valotti comes in. I met Louie outside of a nightclub in Ibiza last year. What I think brought us together was the fact we were outside the club, not inside, and we felt compelled to have an honest conversation at 2 am which led me to begin my actual self-inquiry work in the most uncomplicated way possible. That night, I learned about his shamanism practice along with his own iteration of Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Inquiry, which combines ancient indigenous knowledge with classic tools of self-inquiry. I left puzzled by the questions he had asked me, things I had never really thought about (I am someone who thinks I’ve thought about it all, and he got me there). I was so curious to know more. Through his company Genesis Holistic Medicine, Louie offers a beautiful sacred space for the exploration of the self. Key word here - self. No one can do this work for you, there are no buttons to press to expedite this journey, no one-time psychedelic experience to replace the process of getting to know yourself one step at a time. 

I sat down with Louie to shed light on what Self-Inquiry is, what it can help us accomplish, and hopefully get insight on how writers can challenge beliefs and perspectival structures they may not be aware of to create more meaningful work. 

Trust and Travel: Hi Louie! Great to see you here. Can you tell us about self-inquiry? What exactly does it mean?
Louie: Self-inquiry is an ancient form of self-discovery, maybe one of the oldest we have. The question that follows self-inquiry is, “who am I”? This query is concerned with realizing the highest truth about the nature of one's self and existence. As we’ve discussed before, the truth to who we are is subjective, and it has several layers and perspectives. In that inner pursuit, we come in contact with parts of ourselves. We call them sub-personalities or identities, the parts of ourselves created through life experience, most often through trauma. Through self-inquiry we can become aware of these parts, and start to understand the language, the message, the beliefs that they project through our awareness. And the journey then begins. It has to be done in the most compassionate way because these parts contain the repressed energy that we wish to reintegrate to come closer into embodying who we truly are.

I love this conversation around parts. I find it so profound, it creates so much more expansiveness as we explore our stories. But before we get into that, tell me how you began your journey. 
I began to ask questions in 2006, after I had a spontaneous awakening, where I for a week had this immense experience where I was in an altered state of divine consciousness. After this awakening I started to go down a trail of meditation and self-inquiry, but wasn't as focused as the one I'm practicing today. That awakening moment started having me ask really big questions and wanting to understand the nature of my being, the nature of the universe, slowly moving into mysticism, meditation, shamanic practices and beyond. After about 10 years on that journey, I started developing the self-inquiry I practice today. The deeper journey began when I started working with some of my later teachers like The Maji, and Gabor Maté. But what brought me there was the quest to understand myself better.

When we talk about owning our story, we talk about being as honest, as authentic as we possibly can about our story. Is there any way that you think self-inquiry can help us actually get more clarity on where the authentic self is?
That's the core purpose of self-inquiry. To understand the ultimate truth of ourselves.

However, that is a deep endeavor that requires a dedication and commitment to oneself over a period of time, the willingness to really know the truth. And during that passage, there are many milestones that can be met in understanding and working through the upper layers of who we thought we were. Self-inquiry can help an individual map out their parts or where their thoughts and ideas are coming from and go even deeper. And as they go deeper, their perspective changes. So the truth they express changes as they inquire into themselves.

Every step takes you further, right? So the asking of one question leads to an answer that takes you to another question that takes you to another question. So self-inquiry  is not something that you do once. But I wonder, how do you know what is actually true? What’s your personal truth?
It's a very direct question. I'm most often  sitting on the other side of the conversation. There are many levels of truths to my being. What I mean by that is that I obviously have a physical body that I have identified with deeply growing up. And further down along the path, I became more aware of my mental health, my mental projections, my identity, and truth in terms of what I was thinking unconsciously about myself.

These shadows lurked in my awareness and would in certain situations project a perception over my reality that would scare me or have me run away or not be able to fully live the present moment. When I came even deeper in my journey,  I started to see that these thought patterns and projections stemmed from memories long ago repressed and stored the impression of traumatic experiences. Those impressions were all stored in different places of my body. When reality came close, or merely touched a reference to a past experience my wounds would get triggered. I had to work through many different truths about myself to understand the triggers.  I had to go through the full experience of consciously reliving the initial incidents of the repressed emotions, perceptions, beliefs, and the false truths I had created about myself and the world around me. 

Thanks for sharing that. I think a lot of us struggle with the part where we have to relive past incidents in order to either release them or embody their teaching. That’s why writing is so powerful, along with self-inquiry. I think it’s a magic combination. What do you think would be a first step to help writers get a little bit closer to their truth?
I believe that we are all continuously on a journey of evolution leading to realization of ourselves. Regardless if we're aware of that, or not, we all have the potential to intentionally guide that process. I think the first step is to tune in with the intention of the writer. Really clearly defining an intention, such as why they are where they are and what they want to get out of it. That intentionality works multidimensionally within each person. And whatever comes next will be directly related to the next layer of truth that is available for them to understand.

If the person couldn't set an intention or didn't know why they were there, allowing them just to share what is happening in their life would help bring more clarity about what might be happening deeper within them.  So, finding yourself starts with an intention and that intention is often a question-based intention. For example, “I would like to know why this or that is happening” or “how can I achieve this or that”.

Once a writer has an intention and clarity on what their inquiry is about, what are other important things to notice?
To learn how to discern between what we call explicit memory and implicit memory. When someone tells their story, very often they're sharing their story from an explicit memory, which is their story, what happened. The explicit memory comes from the ego. It comes from the intellectual, subjective understanding of what has happened. The implicit memory, however, is the memory of the unconscious, a memory consisting of repressed emotional energy, beliefs and perception that is stored in the body.

An example is a person having a problem with a relationship and the story is set around the problem, what's happening. Sometimes there can be victimhood or blaming or a perpetrator involved in that story.  Now, that would be the explicit memory. The implicit would be that in that storytelling, their body, their facial expression, their voice and words would reveal cues leading to the unconscious implicit memory from the past. So, to open the self-inquiry, the first step is to listen to the story, but to watch and observe the person as they share it and then be able to interrupt them when the unconscious implicit is present and to shine the light of awareness on it to discover its true source. Because that implicit memory can be something that happened 30 years prior that is still being projected as the current experience of the individual.

That’s fascinating. Tell me more. 
So through self-inquiry we can become aware of the original incident that shaped our lives and how they are being projected onto our current reality. Meaning, we see the world in a certain way based on the repressed trauma we’ve experienced. Self-inquiry is designed to help the individual become more aware and learn how to non-attach from their experiences so they can hold and embody them. Not detach, not push it away, but to create enough space that they can give the repressed emotion, the nucleus of the trauma, a place to exist consciously.

This is a deep healing journey and the deeper experience of this is to support the individual to create enough self-awareness so that they're able to understand and hold the energy of the repressed parts of themselves. Through this process they learn how to hold the pain that got repressed and stuck. This inner transformation helps us see the old story from a different point of view, which gives us a higher truth to write from. 

It’s profound, and working with you has really changed my approach to writing so much. Could you leave us with some tools we could use to start unpacking the layers of our stories? 
The first step is to recognize if one is reliving certain patterns in their life that are less than ideal. Then, the first invitation from there is to become self-aware that there is something within that is causing this pattern to reoccur. First step is to take full responsibility with curiosity and the intention to understand what is the truth of this pattern that is reflecting itself in your life.

The second step goes into what traditional psychotherapy does really well. It goes into mapping the past, becoming aware of the actual explicit timeline of when what happened in what relationship and to map that out. Doing that work (which many are starting to become aware of) doesn't create healing. Becoming aware of the trauma and mentally letting it go doesn't heal. It doesn't take care of and heal the implicit that we've been talking about, the trauma that is stored in our subtle bodies. But it does give the framework to connect the dots between the patterns that are happening in your life and from which trauma, from which incidents are streaming from.

And from there, we can start making the unconscious conscious. To work somatically in co-regulation with someone that can help direct the pattern towards the memory and then into the body, into the implicit to start working with the parts and the repressed energy that is there.

Be mindful that we all have trauma, it is a natural and necessary part of being human. Spiritually it is actually our trauma that becomes the vehicle in which we can grow, heal and evolve into our highest expression of truth. The traumas are especially designed for our human experience to take form and challenge us to evolve.

To anyone interested in learning more about this work, we’ll be hosting a podcast on the Genesis platform on 2\29. To learn more about Louie, you can find him on Instagram @louievalotti and @genesishealth.life