61 Introduction The main goal of this chapter is to introduce Embodied Spiritual Inquiry (ESI) as a partici- patory research method in the context of spiritual and contemplative studies. ESI applies Albareda and Romero’s interactive embodied meditations (Ferrer 2003; Sohmer 2018) in the context of a participatory research paradigm inspired by Cooperative Inquiry (CI; Heron 1996) in order to access multiple human faculties (e.g., somatic, vital, emotional, mental, contemplative) and mindfully inquire into collaboratively decided questions. ESI system- atically engages both contemplative awareness and multiple ways of knowing through mindful physical contact among practitioners. Contemplation is thus not applied as a prep- aration for or enhancement of intellectual learning (valuable strategies in themselves) but as the very means of a participatory inquiry seeking to intersubjectively access the epistemic power of all human attributes (i.e., body, vital world, heart, mind, and consciousness; Ferrer 2002; Ferrer, Romero, and Albareda 2005). Discussing ESI’s epistemological foundations, methodological approach, and a sample case study, this chapter introduces ESI as a research method of particular value for the domains of spirituality and contemplative studies. Foundations and Presuppositions ESI names a contemplative participatory method designed by Jorge N. Ferrer in the context of graduate courses offered at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. ESI was taught every other year at California Institute of Integral Studies between 2003 and 2015 by Ferrer, who also taught it at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2009 (Nakagawa and Matsuda 2010) and presented it at the 2011 American Academy of Religion annual meeting (Ferrer 2011b). ESI has been also presented as a radical, second-person approach to contemplative education (Ferrer and Sohmer 2017) and as a transpersonal research method (Anderson 2018; Sohmer 2019). A variety of inquiry topics have been explored, including several directly focused on spiritual questions. For example, Osterhold, Husserl, and Nicol (2007) presented the results of an ESI that addressed the nature of relational spirituality and participants’ experiences 6 EMBODIED SPIRITUAL INQUIRY A Participatory Research Method for Spiritual and Contemplative Studies Olga R. Sohmer and Jorge N. Ferrer DOI: 10.4324/9781003341598-8