The 3 Fundamentals of Practical Inner Work

Too often, the process of inner work is sold as a super serious, intense, you-must-be-motivated, you-must-be-focused deep dive into one’s depths.

We’re told we need to sit 20 minutes a day, twice, and have picture-perfect posture while doing so. Or we’re invited to long weekend retreats that remove us from our partners and families, costing us in both money and vital time with our loved ones.

Even therapy – a core component of inner work – requires vast amounts of money to sustain in the long term.

For many of us, this version of high-intensity inner work is simply unsustainable – and realistically, it often feels disconnected from our full sense of humanity.

Instead, we’re looking for practical inner work.

Over the past decade of working with folks, I’ve come to believe there are three fundamentals of inner work that is practical, sustainable, and deeply dignity-centered.

• Why fundamental? Because these three aspects of inner work – story, practice, and solidarity – bring us into our depths in an honest, embodied, and connected way. When we ignore one or more of them, our experience of life tends to feel more shallow. We can find ourselves running on autopilot, just surviving today to get to tomorrow. But when we engage with all of them, our inner work percolates up into our relationships, not only with ourselves, but with everyone and everything around us.

• Why practical? Because if it’s not practical, it’s just not worth it. In the context of surviving a traumatizing (and traumatized) world, we each have limited time and limited emotional energy. We don’t want to keep intellectualizing and bypassing our life. Instead, we want to find sustainable, embodied practices that help us be present to our daily lives.

• Why inner work? Because, as Dr. Cornel West says, “the truth is that we are all wounded. The only question is whether we use our wounds to hurt others or whether we use them to become healers.” It’s through inner work that we begin to gently examine who we are and how we interact with the world around us. Not as separate from, but deeply and uniquely interconnected with. It’s through inner work that we begin to see with soft eyes and then act with purpose and meaning.

The process of inner work opens us – in our bodies, in our communities, in our worldviews – to an experience of what adrienne maree brown calls “the tingling prickling aliveness of interconnection, of history, of futures becoming possible.”

Engaging our inner work in a practical way begins with gaining clarity about the stories we carry with us: the narratives we have about ourselves, about our communities and cosmos, and – vitally – about what our presence means in the midst of this context.

Because the stories we carry give shape to the person we become.

If we grew up internalizing messages of unworthiness, body-negativity, saviorism, and separation, without examination these become the narratives we perpetuate through our actions in the world. We move in ways that separate people and nature from their inherent dignity, we take up less space (or more space) than we ought to, we attempt to fix, save, correct, and dominate, and we learn the most important lenses to see through are those of good/bad, in/out, and right/wrong.

But when we take time to examine our stories, we expand our capacity for skillful action and choicefulness.

We learn to ask gentle questions of these narratives in order to discern which reflect our embodied experience and which do not; we practice making intentional, informed decisions about which stories we want to live ourselves into and which we would like to let go of; we name and claim the stories that feel good in our bodies and open doors of possibility in our lives.

Beginning with our story is difficult and crucial.

It’s through this process that we come face-to-face with our conditioned tendencies and trauma responses. We encounter those feelings of guilt, shame, and self-blame that often live just beneath the surface of our lives. But we also begin to learn how to trust our bodies and the stories that emerge from our own experiences, rather than just those from external sources.

And there’s no “one right way” to do this examination work. For some, it might include therapy, coaching and tools like the Enneagram; for others it might center on reading self-help books, attending survivor groups, or hosting weekly friend nights. (For me, playing racquetball was a huge part of my process for leaning into a new body-affirming story – it really can be anything.)

(This first fundamental is what my book Unmasking the Inner Critic and The Wednesday 1-2-3 are centered on, for the most part.)

But regardless of what engaging with our stories might look like, the core questions we move with are:

If there is a “goal” in working with our stories, it’s simply to become more clear about who we are in the midst of all this.

Fundamental 2: Practice

Once we’ve spent some time examining our stories, it’s important to move into practice.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean beginning to meditate twice a day for 20 minutes, going away on intense (and expensive) journaling and yoga retreats, or creating an elaborate self-care ritual that will require all the stars to line up in order to actually do it.

While this approach might work for some folks, it’s not very practical or sustainable for most of us.

Instead, the work here isn’t to commit forever to a specific practice, but to the ongoing, evolving, open and curiosity-filled act of practice.

This means we find practices that fit who we are, are flexible and can change with us as we change, and that we can engage with intention, attention, and repetition; practices we can hold gently and enjoy without judgement, shame, blame, guilt, or with any intention of somehow “brute forcing” our way to enlightenment; practices that can serve as a bridge between the stories we hold and the embodied change we wish to be part of in our communities.

And yes – it might be meditating twice a day for 20 minutes or the occasional yoga retreat; but it also might be as simple as prioritizing a daily walk, journaling before bed, or doing some box breathing when conflict arises.

Our practice (or set of practices) can be anything that helps us build our capacity to embody the healthiest parts of our stories in the world.

(Tinkering and finding these kinds of practices in our lives is what we emphasize in the Inner Work Cohort.)

Fundamental 3: Solidarity

Moving within a cultural context of individualism and meritocracy, it’s vital we acknowledge:

Our inner work is never isolated work.

We each move and work and act and play within a context of relationships: relationships to ourselves, to others, to the natural world (which, of course also includes us), and to the Universe. And therefore there is no such thing as self-care or self-love or self-help removed from the act of communal and collective joy, struggle, and healing.

To move in solidarity with another is the embodied recognition that our lives and liberation are connected with theirs.

As Dr. Cornel West writes,

"The truth is that we are all wounded. The only question is whether we use our wounds to hurt others or whether we use them to become healers.”

For me, this is the ultimate purpose of inner work: to connect deeply with our own stories, to build our capacity for embodying the healthiest parts of them, and to practice moving, however imperfectly, alongside others in dignity-affirming ways.