The “distance” we hold is often in direct proportion to how much emotional pain we were exposed to with emotional connections earlier in our lives.

The looking/questioning, the sense of you, the gap, and the thought-stuff, are all the same flowing substance.

“What is here that is not a thought or image?” Go there and don’t turn back.

“What we are looking for is what is looking.” —St Francis of Assisi

After some practice, we will learn to effortlessly discriminate conceptuality from immediate experience. With this, we learn to trust that immediate experience more and we start to “get” the whole point of inquiry on an experiential level.

as if that relaxed space itself is what is doing the investigation.

I consider emotions that are distorted by beliefs, interpretations, concepts, and identities to be compound in nature. While a pure emotion can be experienced directly, a compound emotion is more clearly experienced when we are aware of its individual components.

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just simply ask the question with all of the curiosity you can muster in the moment.