My friends tell me that I ask great questions. It’s no wonder that I became someone who asks questions as a healing practice.

The truth is I’m just endlessly curious. I love learning about people, about life, and especially about spiritual things. That’s probably why I read so much.

Recently, it occurred to me that I could intentionally use curiosity as an approach to problems and challenges.

So much of life is mystery, isn’t it? How do you face the mystery of life? The issues, questions, challenges? I don’t know about you, but the mysterious makes me curious, and curiosity is at least a much more interesting approach to the mystery of life than fear.

Curiosity used in this way might look like:

• an openness of heart
• an open-mindedness to the experience of life
• a continuing acknowledgment of all that you don’t know; living from a place of humility
• a willingness to be surprised by life
• a willingness to be patient with yourself and with life’s complexity

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,

“…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”  

Can you hold the questions that are permeating your life right now? Can you live with them from a posture of curiosity? The answers come, but sometimes you have to slowly move into them. You look back at some point and hopefully find that you’ve lived your way into the answer, as Rilke said. That’s my hope for myself, and I’ve seen it happen before.

I think of the late poet Mary Oliver as curiosity’s patron saint. In “Poem 102: When Death Comes,” she says,

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.

Her marriage to wonder comes through most clearly in her enchantment with the natural world, which saved her from a difficult home life as a child and continued to draw her attention through the rest of her life, eventually becoming the subject of so many of her inspiring poems. She also writes a lot about God.

To be a spiritual seeker is to be, like Oliver was, someone who dances with Mystery, with that which cannot be fully captured nor completely understood, that which is in us and yet we are also fully contained by, were created by. It is to be willing to travel the length of this life journey with depth—with an awareness of the grand questions that walk alongside you at each stage.

And sometimes we get tired of the questions! There are some questions/issues in my life that I would love to give away, to be honest. It can sometimes feel like certain issues have been with us for too long without being answered.  Spiritual seeker or not, to be human is to live with so much that is not within our control or even our understanding. I’ve been experimenting with curiosity as a softening, opening energy that can help me find the way through that.

In the poem “Guest House,” Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) says,

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

He says that some days the “guest” will be joy, some days it will be sorrow – entering your life like unexpected visitors! He says to welcome them all, be grateful for them, that each one has been sent as a guide from the beyond.

When’s the last time you welcomed your anger, your grief, your sorrow? The last time you marveled at your joy? Something changes when we approach our feelings and experiences in this way, with curiosity. I see this happen in somatic healing sessions. When we approach the body with curiosity, wonder, and openness, something shifts – physically, too.

The curious approach is ultimately a mindful approach, and just like with mindfulness, there’s an extended beauty of practicing it; our curious perspective will naturally extend outwards, to all our connections. One of the things we all need but rarely find is someone who can share our life’s questions with us, without needing to change or fix us, or tell us how we should be, without pressing premature answers onto us. The only way to be that kind of presence is to be someone who has engaged with the ways that Mystery has burrowed its way into your own existence. Then we become someone who can love and accept those near to us despite the mystery that limits our full understanding of them or their life. We no longer need to fill the mystery with our own understanding or analysis. We can just be with them – or not.

As a spiritual value, curiosity deepens the experience of life beyond suffering and challenge. It teaches us that not knowing can even be a comfort; the part you don’t know yet might be something good! Yes, there is a glimmer of hope hidden in the curious perspective.

If you’re searching, keep searching. Keep seeking. I’ll be searching and seeking alongside you, in my own life. And I’m here to help you in your seeking, if you’d like to work together 1-on-1. With open eyes and heart, we just might live our way into the answers.