I’ve been doing AYP twice daily for several years — deep meditation, spinal breathing, the usual progression. I attempted self-inquiry several times over the first few years over practice, and it never really clicked. However, over the past year or so, after taking in self-inquiry instructions from a few sources outside AYP, something finally clicked, and I’ve started getting exceptionally good results with it.
The clearest signal came at a recent week-long retreat where I did essentially nothing but self-inquiry the entire time. It produced one of the biggest leaps in progress I’ve ever felt — starkly different from previous retreats where I stuck mostly to meditation and pranayama. And in daily life, when I lean heavily into self-inquiry, the peace, stillness, and well-being it leaves behind is more noticeable than what I get from my conventional meditation/pranayama practices. In short, based on my direct experience and where I am on my path, self inquiry really seems to hit significantly harder than meditation and pranayama.
Yogani’s stance on this in his teachings are very clear. Keep meditation and pranayama as your primary practice, and add in self inquiry when you are ripe. There are a few neo-advaita/direct path lineages out there which take an opposite stance, saying that self inquiry can be used as a primary practice. Yogani fairly calls this out as being a potential trap which can keep you stuck in non-relational self inquiry, spinning your wheels for some time.
If I look at my own direct experience, here is how I see it.
The case for the standard AYP approach:
- The only reason I was able to experience such positive results from self inquiry in the first place, was because of my several years of AYP meditation and pranayama. I think this is by far the strongest argument you can make, and is an argument that yogani clearly outlines in his texts.
The case for self inquiry as one’s primary practice:
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My own direct experience. At the end of the day, the guru is in you, and in yogani’s words, we are all spiritual scientists that need to do a little experimentation to find what works for us. Based on the data I have at the moment, self inquiry just seems to power wash obstructions away like nothing else I have experienced. However, as mentioned above, it’s possible this is only happening because of my baseline meditation practice, not in spite of it.
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I am going out on a bit of a limb here. But, based on what has been arising in my experience, it feels that when performed properly, self inquiry allows the practitioner to touch into inner silence in a manner fairly similar to meditation. I would agree that when I first tried self inquiry earlier on in the path, it was highly non-relational. Now, self inquiry feels much more like a process of releasing one’s question into inner silence. I suppose technically its a bit more like samyama in that sense, rather than meditation. But I suppose the argument I am trying to make here is that, when done properly, experientially it sure feels like self inquiry is cultivating inner silence in a similar way that core practices do. However, at least in my own experience, not only does self inquiry feel like it’s generating inner silence, it also has this extremely intense quality of dislodging ego structures and identification with my thoughts, that I feel like I don’t get from meditation nearly as much.
For context, this line of thinking came about by studying the works of angelo dilullo, specifically his main book “Awake: It’s your Turn”. But, what I find to be more valuable than looking at the works of any individual author, is to look at the results of the practitioners within a particular community. After developing friendships with a few members in the community, many of them have had experiences mirroring my own. Many seem to be yielding exceptional results with self inquiry as a primary practice, and meditation as a supplementary practice, rather than the inverse which is typically taught in AYP. However, as usual the waters are murky, because most people I talked to had several years (or decades) or meditation experience prior to making the shift to self inquiry as the primary practice. So, it often comes back to the chicken or the egg question which was mentioned above. It can be really hard to isolate variables when trying to measure these sorts of things.
At the moment, my current AYP practice is pretty simple. Twice daily SBP + DM. 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. I am toying with the idea of replacing these two sitting sessions with 2x 30 minute sessions of devoted self inquiry.
As a lifelong follower of AYP, needless to say I am a bit apprehensive at the potential decision to directly contradict AYP teachings and take up self-inquiry as my core standalone practice.
Curious what others think, especially anyone who’s actually navigated this shift. Am I missing a pitfall, or is there genuinely more nuance here than the standard guidance suggests?