Some touchstone inquiry questions that can be helpful ways of approaching the 'tools' of Core Process psychotherapy:
Depth Work and the Unconscious
• How comfortable are you at working with repressed material and psycho-emotional issues such as anxiety, rage; aggression; depression and fear?
• How do you stay with childhood traumas?
• Are you able to recognise and hold processes of shock and traumatisation in your system?
• Are you able to recognise and be with the dynamics of what is commonly called 'the Shadow’?
• Are you comfortable with strong expressive energy?
• Can you relate to and be with the imaginal, the transpersonal, the existential and the arche-typal?
• Can you be with extreme dissociative states or crises?
The Therapeutic Relationship
• Are your communication skills well developed?
• How would you describe your experience of inter-being in this context?
Learning Goals
• List two primary learning goals that you intend to achieve in the near future.
Therapeutic Work on Self
• What personal issues and challenges do you face in order to develop?
Existential Themes
• Are you comfortable working with issues where there is no remedy but only confronting the pain of your experience, such as death, isolation, loss of freedom or meaninglessness?
• Where does help come from?
Buddhist Psychology
• How does the relationship of form and emptiness influence your processes? Can you relate to your 'Brilliant Sanity' even in times of crisis?
• What is your understanding of the balance between Spaciousness, Clarity and Compassion?
Skills or Tools:
Can you:
• Hold sustained attention?
• Work non-judgmentally?
• Receive information through 'subliminal mind'?
• Hold your inherent health?
• Hold the 'larger picture?
• Hold material contemplatively?
• Identify how you may create your suffering?
• Work transformatively with your own experience?
• Balance attention 'in' and 'out'?
• Honour both the mystery and inter-relatedness?
• Resonate with Joy and Bliss
Avoidance
• Do you feel there are any major areas of avoidance in your own experience, or other areas of human experience which you have not fully identified, experienced or explored?
* How do you approach the unlived life?