Since the inception of our preliminary (exploratory) research in 1993 we have chosen to use a holistic approach to describe and develop the ACM Living Awareness programme instead of recurring to standard research methodologies. The reason for this is that we wanted to define a new integrated language and theoretical framework that enables us to describe the holistic development of learners. A language that isn't result oriented and that allows us to describe the unfolding of a Whole Person or Holistic learning process. We define our investigative approach as Holistic Research.

Two aspects are central to this approach:

1. Firstly the observation of the living system within its ecosystem (the Whole) before breaking down to study any part of the specimen "whole to part",
2. The researcher is not a passive observer of an external universe, but is in a reciprocal, participatory relationship with nature, and that his/her observation is a valuable contribution to the research process.