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ABSTRACT: Organic inquiry is an emerging approach to qualitative research that attracts people and topics related to psycho-spiritual growth. The psyche of the researcher becomes the subjective "instrument" of the research, working in partnership with liminal and spiritual influences as well as with the experiences of participants. A three-step process of preparation, inspiration, and integration governs both data collection and analysis. Analysis involves the cognitive integration of liminal/spiritual encounters with the data. Organic inquiry invites transformative change, which includes not only information, but also a transformation that consists of both changes of mind and changes of heart. The approach offers a process for cultivating these changes, not only to researcher and participants, but additionally to readers of the research. Stories present the findings using both feeling and thinking modalities, in order to engage the reader in a similar process of transformative interpretation.
INTRODUCTION
Organic inquiry has grown over the past 10 years in the context of student work at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. The approach draws upon multiple ways of knowing and invites the researcher to work in partnership with sources beyond ego. While not a fully developed research method in itself, it may have relevance for the discovery process of many qualitative designs.
Perhaps the most important, and novel, aspect of organic inquiry is its strong emphasis on transformation as well as information (i.e. the knowledge building function of all research). The approach incorporates the idea that research can include spirit, body, and feeling as well as mind (Braud & Anderson, 1998). Guided by transpersonal psychology's many models of human development, organic inquiry uses the context of a particular topic to offer transformative change, defined as a resulting restructuring of one's worldview that provides some discrete degree of movement along one's lifetime path toward further transpersonal development. Organic inquiry invites transformative changes of both mind and heart, as further illuminated below.
Although outside the scope of this article, it is important to acknowledge the wide array of researchers, too numerous to mention, who are pursuing a better understanding of transformative change in the human experience. Authors, like Jack Mezirow and colleagues, for example, have spent decades researching how one's worldview may become restructured by critical reflectivity, focusing on what I might...