Curiosity is a Wildflower, part I
If curiosity were a season, it would be spring.
It would be the wildflowers that bloom in spring.
Spring wildflowers in the Mojave high desert
How does it feel in your body when you look at wildflowers? Even just one, bursting up brightly through the earth, fearlessly and full of grace?
That’s the playful frequency of curiosity and its deceptively powerful alchemy.
A necessary distinction here between curiosity + violation: curiosity is not being nosy or prying, or minding anyone else’s business but our own.
Curiosity is not about disrespecting boundaries and being intrusive.
Those are violations.
Again, stop for a moment and feel that in your body - when you’ve been “curious” in this way. Or when someone has been “curious” in this way towards you.
How does it feel?
Does it feel different from the wildflower nature of curiosity invoked above?
Without judging, simply notice the difference.
For me, that distorted “curiosity”, aka violation, feels like a sort of graspy, hungry ghost type energy. There’s a void that needs to be filled, a wound that needs to be tended to and instead of doing that for myself, I’m grabbing for someone else’s life force to fill it with.
Sometimes it can be learned behavior from older, generational patterns of not understanding the nature of boundary violations.
Feeling into the distinction is beautifully subjective and nuanced (like art). The invitation here is to begin to notice the difference and become genuinely curious about how it plays out for you.
But back to the wildflowers-in-spring medicine of curiosity: I can’t say enough about how powerful this simple invocation of curiosity is.
This morning, for example, something triggered my inner judge to begin tirade of judging me for not being a completely perfect human being at all times, and I should be like that instead of like this and yada yada yada.
Curiosity popped up, bright and yellow: oh look, judgment, hi judgment.
Attuning to curiosity, I allowed it to guide me towards feeling judgment in my body: constriction in my belly, some fear, some heat. I put my hand there, let myself feel it.
I asked the sensation of judgment what it needed.
Turns out, it needed some love. It needed to be felt and acknowledged. It told me some things, some stories that it was looping on that weren’t my stories, it turns out. They weren’t authentic or true for me, and they were definitely past their expiration date. With the help of curiosity, I was able to resource it, make space for some of the stuck energy to expand, intensify, release and integrate.
Now this doesn’t mean that my inner judge won’t be triggered and return again. But it knows and I know that when it does, it’ll be related to with curiosity + compassion, not numbed or identified with.
(Interestingly, as I write this I can’t remember what the trigger was. And nor do I care to, because it’s not about the trigger. The trigger did its job beautifully, showing me through the natural flow of my life where some judgment needed tending to, bringing me more intimacy and connection with my Self.)
Judgment - towards ourselves and others - is usually an unfulfilled need or an unmet part of ourselves that needs to be lovingly integrated.
How so towards others, you may be asking.
That’s what part 2 will be about.
For now, I’ll end with the reminder that the nuanced and highly subjective art of relating to ourselves is a fundamental aspect of decolonial alchemy. And for that, we need capacity, as well as understanding where our capacity is at any given moment, and to advocate for ourselves from this place.
Join the weekly drop-in The Light Gets In this Sunday at 10am PST to create more capacity and dive deeper into these practices.