Table 1.

Components of a mindful inquiry process in a mindful model of sexual health

Mindful model of sexual health: Mindful inquiry steps with body, breath, inquiry, and integration	Purpose
Body: “If comfortable for you, allow your eyes to close. Another option is to soften and allow your gaze to drop, so as to engage your “inner eyes.” Focus your attention to include your whole physical body. With compassionate awareness, explore and note your direct experience of sensations and information throughout your body. Notice your automatic reactions to what you experience.”	Learn the active practice of being present with oneself. Practice slowing down, interrupt automatic reactivity, and create space between impulse and response.
Breath: “Focus on and feel the physiological changes that are happening with the inhale and exhale. Allow your inhale and exhale to invite your attention to stay with, return focus to, and deepen direct experience within the body. Continue to gently return focus to your breath, again and again.”	Learn the active practice of returning focus on observing inner experience between mind-wandering, moments of distraction, or disconnection. The breath may serve as an anchor of attention in the present moment as well as a pathway to return to the present.
Inquiry: “Now expand and include awareness of sensations, emotions, images, impulses, words, memories, metaphorical representations, or whatever may arise on its own.” Experiment with asking a mindful inquiry or an inner question and observe what emerges in response. Create space to allow and welcome whatever may arise. Let go of expectations of responses. Allow things to be shown to you. Observe with open curiosity, without judgment or interpretation of meaning. Be open and curious toward what the body/mind brings up to awareness to reveal and explore (i.e., an inquiry about self-compassion might bring up information about shame). Organizational beliefs operating below conscious awareness may, at times, seemingly contradict cognitive beliefs. Practice acknowledging and appreciating self-protective processes or mechanisms before evaluating whether they continue to serve healthy functioning (i.e., be open to exploring questions like, “How might this have served me in the past? How might this have protected me or met certain needs?”).	Within a state of presence, develop the mindful “witness” or “observer” to investigate subtle data that emerge anew from within. Practice a mindfully focused and managed holistic information-gathering process, which is different from automatically retrieving or operating from information from the past that may be distorted, harm-contributing, outdated, or not true. Learn to notice when cognitive processes jump to judgments or distorted perceptions.
Integration: Attend to information from interoceptive awareness. Explore possible meanings of a mindful inquiry experience and what resonates as truth from this mindful and connected state. Integrate the meanings and any new perspectives into a cohesive narrative. Assess and reevaluate beliefs that have contributed to automatic patterns of thinking, seeing, or behaving. For example, acknowledge how coping or other processes may have been organized around self-protecting or surviving in the past. Engage in a mindful and fresh evaluation about healthy functioning in present. Correct and clarify outdated beliefs, so that operational beliefs are in alignment with reality, truth, and the promotion of body/mind/spirit health. Install updated beliefs into a new operating system. Ask, “Is there is anything else that would like to be expressed, acknowledged, known, shared or explored before closing the mindful experience?”	Incorporate mindful acknowledgment and compassionate meeting of all domains of self. Cultivate a mindful and clear way to observe current state of how operating systems are functioning. Engage in a self-evaluation of efficacy of patterns of functioning. Create a conscious and mindfully informed narrative and identify practices that will integrate new perspectives and practices into setting goals for these realizations.