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.

This is why I often say:

We can do deep, heavy inner work in a soft, light-hearted way.

Inner work is hard, but it doesn’t have to be dreadful.

We can bring our full humanity to it – including our wonderful weirdness and humor and gentleness – and in ways that don’t separate us from the life we’re leading and the communities that surround us.

When we engage in this kind of embodied, grounded inner work, we deepen in our sense of aliveness and are able to more fully participate in our communities in new and healing ways.

Why is inner work so vital?

When we experience this imperfect world, no matter our position within it and with all the illusions it foists upon us, none of us come away unscarred.

We respond by creating constricting narratives of our own about who we are, ones that can be confirmed again and again by the world outside us as well as within. Over time, these internal narratives blend together with the constricting narratives of capitalism, meritocracy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and dualism until we find ourselves wrapped in a personality that doesn’t quite feel like us.

If we don’t engage in a process of embodied inner work, we can numb out to these feelings and live our lives on autopilot, or worse, we can walk down the street as curmudgeons, blowing the under-examined traumas of our lives through the bodies of those around us.

Richard Rohr, one of the most influential teachers I’ve had in my life, often likes to say, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

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

Three levels of inner work

Most inner work practitioners emphasize only the first level of inner work: the personal.

This is what the self-care industry is all about. If you walk into the self-help section of any bookstore, these are the topics you’ll see spread out in front of you: how to change your habits, live a longer and healthier life, unleash your creativity – oh, and that one book about not giving a f*ck. And while self-care and self-help are extremely important, without engaging the communal and societal levels, they are incomplete.

In fact, without engaging those two levels, they are harmful.

Each of our lives happens within a broader context. We live and work and play within communities and embodied cultures; we operate within societal systems that incentivize us to think and operate in very specific ways.

When we only focus on our own personal, individual healing, we will inevitably ignore both the suffering and the possibility held within the broader context we are interwoven into.

As Rev. angel Kyodo williams says:

“Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”

The shadow work framework: what is shadow work? Societal, communal, personal levels

In my workshops and courses, everything I help folks work with lives within the following levels of inner work:

Personal: one’s internal narratives and stories, relationship to their own body, sense of awareness, and sense of connection and interconnection
Communal: the narratives and stories told within our communities, the ways in which we can participate relationally in healing, how we form communities of solidarity and honesty
Societal: the ways in which systems deemed “too big to fail” have perpetuated and infused themselves into our political systems, communities, and our identities, worldviews, and spiritualities

Obviously, each of these levels involve work that can seem daunting and frustratingly never-ending. And that’s true – if we attempt to solve every “problem” within these levels, it is likely an impossible task.

Unfortunately, that’s what many spaces claiming “inner work” and “formation” have tended to do: provide answers, teach certainty, and emphasize obvious solutions. But inner work is not about fixing, saving, solving, correcting, colonizing, or optimizing anything.

It is a slow, gentle, embodied process of building one’s capacity to carry a healing posture a little bit more today than yesterday. And a little bit more tomorrow than today.

And this process can’t be reduced down to one’s engagement with and commitment to just one practice.

Each of us is wonderfully different – from each other and from ourselves in different seasons of our lives. Therefore, the ways in which we engage in our inner work can be held softly and with flexibility as well.

At different points in our lives, our inner work might include things like:

conversations with friends,
intentional discernment,
organized activism,
deep questioning,
small group work,
church retreats,
workshops,
meditation,
journaling,
walking,
therapy,
and/or play!

In my work with folks, I bring together various practices from internal family systems, somatic experiencing, contemplative spirituality, Jungian psychology, asset-based community development, organizing and activist work, and even from my time teaching in the American education system.

But regardless of the practice and the season of life, deep, embodied inner work tends to come down to increasing the depth of our awareness, asking questions of our experience of the world, and actively participating with a healing posture in our communities.

At every level of our inner work, each of these three elements can be engaged:

How are we becoming more and more aware of what’s really happening?
What are the questions arising and emerging from within us?
What are the questions that make new futures possible?
How am I being invited to participate in this space with a healing posture?

Deepening our Experience of Presence

In Casper ter Kuile’s brilliant book, The Power of Ritual, he shares that practices with the power to deepen our sense of presence, meaning, and experience have three common traits:

Intention: Recognizing what are we inviting into this moment
Attention: Being present in this moment
Repetition: Creating space to come back to this time and time again

When a practice has all three of these components, ter Kuile says it has the power to “make the invisible connections that make life meaningful, visible.”

This is at the core of inner work: how are we engaging our lives and the life of our communities with intention, attention, and repetition? A bit more today than yesterday. And a bit more tomorrow than today.

Where does spirituality fit into inner work?

For many of us, the word "spiritual" is tainted by our experiences with organized religion.

It's tainted by the promises made and not kept, by our encounters with "spiritual people" who turned out to be emotionally harmful, and with so-called "spiritual practices" that too often gave cover to tactics of manipulation, domination, and control.

There is good reason to give pause when someone uses the word "spiritual."

So, what do I mean when I say it and where does it fit into inner work?

When I say “spiritual,” I may as well be using the word connectedness.

How are you sensing your connectedness with your inherent dignity?
What is the texture of your connectedness with others around you?
What about with our Earth, ecosystem, and the natural world?
And what about with That-Which-Is-Bigger-Than-You? (whatever name you have for that)

It isn’t about doctrines or rule-following; it has nothing to do with domination, manipulation, or control; in fact, I see spirituality – how we experience connectedness – as a movement out of and beyond such harmful worldviews.

It’s down-to-earth and rooted in the present moment.

For some, the language and tools and practices of the spiritual traditions they grew up with can help their inner work go even deeper. And for others, it can be entirely the opposite. What’s important is that each of us has the space and gentle support to find what works for us – that helps us to embody our inherent dignity and feel connected within what Mary Oliver called this great “family of things.”

We can do deep, heavy inner work in a soft, light-hearted way.