Healthy Mind
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The Magical Power of Curiosity
September 2021
By Amy Beth Acker, LCSW
As a therapist and life coach, I am privy to my clients’ innermost thoughts and feelings. I talk to my clients daily about their greatest fears, their greatest sources of pain, and their deepest hopes and dreams.
My work puts me in a privileged position to understand truths about humanity that can be otherwise hard to see. One thing we all have in common is our constant searching for the truth. We want to know who we are and what our purpose is. We want to know what to believe about the world we live in and who and what we can trust. We want to understand what’s real and what’s safe to believe in.
Because of the level of fear and uncertainty we’ve all had to live with since the early spring of 2020, this hunger for the truth has become more pronounced than ever. Our brains love certainty, predictability and facts, and it seems as if all of this was taken from us overnight. In the wake of unrelenting global fear and unrest, we are left grasping for any semblance of the truth. And yet, the more humanity demands to know what’s going on, the further we all seem to get away from it.
Every one of us has suffered — individually and as a species. We could say that our suffering is unique, but we also suffer as one. I understand this because suffering is a part of the human experience; although we can use tools like mindfulness and thought work to lessen it, we can never fully escape it.
This is where the magical power of curiosity comes in.
I have found curiosity to be an extremely underrated yet infinitely powerful tool in helping to ease suffering and to find Truth.
When our nervous systems are in a state of chronic fear, we become disconnected from our bodies and the present moment. We’re in fight or flight response, freeze response (completely disconnected from reality), or we’re in fawn (when energy and efforts are focused on people-pleasing and placating others at our own expense).
None of these states allow us to be in our bodies in the present moment. And when we can’t be present with reality, we lose our ability to make choices from a conscious, intentional place.
Fear brings with it systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. Fear brings with it dogmatic belief systems that are closed to all inquiry and create division. Fear also brings a lack of freedom because, when we’re in chronic fear, we’re identifying with the thing we’re fearing. We’re trying to make sense of contradictory information, so we dig our heels in, making everyone who doesn’t think just like us wrong and bad.
As a therapist and life coach, I am privy to my clients’ innermost thoughts and feelings. I talk to my clients daily about their greatest fears, their greatest sources of pain, and their deepest hopes and dreams.
My work puts me in a privileged position to understand truths about humanity that can be otherwise hard to see. One thing we all have in common is our constant searching for the truth. We want to know who we are and what our purpose is. We want to know what to believe about the world we live in and who and what we can trust. We want to understand what’s real and what’s safe to believe in.
Because of the level of fear and uncertainty we’ve all had to live with since the early spring of 2020, this hunger for the truth has become more pronounced than ever. Our brains love certainty, predictability and facts, and it seems as if all of this was taken from us overnight. In the wake of unrelenting global fear and unrest, we are left grasping for any semblance of the truth. And yet, the more humanity demands to know what’s going on, the further we all seem to get away from it.
Every one of us has suffered — individually and as a species. We could say that our suffering is unique, but we also suffer as one. I understand this because suffering is a part of the human experience; although we can use tools like mindfulness and thought work to lessen it, we can never fully escape it.
This is where the magical power of curiosity comes in.
I have found curiosity to be an extremely underrated yet infinitely powerful tool in helping to ease suffering and to find Truth.
When our nervous systems are in a state of chronic fear, we become disconnected from our bodies and the present moment. We’re in fight or flight response, freeze response (completely disconnected from reality), or we’re in fawn (when energy and efforts are focused on people-pleasing and placating others at our own expense).
None of these states allow us to be in our bodies in the present moment. And when we can’t be present with reality, we lose our ability to make choices from a conscious, intentional place.
Fear brings with it systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. Fear brings with it dogmatic belief systems that are closed to all inquiry and create division. Fear also brings a lack of freedom because, when we’re in chronic fear, we’re identifying with the thing we’re fearing. We’re trying to make sense of contradictory information, so we dig our heels in, making everyone who doesn’t think just like us wrong and bad.
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Curiosity allows the rigid paradigms of the fear brain to start to soften. Curiosity gives us liberation from the need to control how others think. It frees us from the need to nail down some ultimate, irrefutable truth so we can finally feel okay again. It allows us to sit in comfortable companionship with our doubt and confusion. It brings us back to the middle path where there can be multiple truths and where our need to “know,” to feel safe, and to have peace finally starts to loosen its grip on us.
Curiosity is about asking questions from a place of openness and willingness to see things differently. |
"Curiosity is about asking questions from a place of openness and willingness to see things differently." ~ Amy Beth Acker, LCSW |
These questions might look like this:
These thought experiments allow us to loosen our attachment to our truth needing to be the right one. As Byron Katie, a self-help practitioner, said, “I didn’t let go of my stressful thoughts. I questioned them, and then they let go of me.”
When we are curious about our thoughts, this allows us to become the observer and witness to the mind’s constant chatter and its need to always be right. We are an information-hungry society; yet it seems the more information we feed ourselves, the hungrier we seem to get.
Our need for “the facts” can become an addiction because every time we get a hit of information, our brains secrete dopamine, the neurochemical that fuels the brain’s reward system. Curiosity pulls us away from our bottomless hunger to binge on data until we can nail down the truth. It helps us to be present in the moment where we can find freedom from urgency and the need to judge and categorize our worlds. Curiosity brings a sense of openness, play, and creativity and allows us to begin to relax and see ourselves and our world with new eyes and a beginner’s mind.
We can’t change what we’re not aware of. Therefore, without self-awareness, we can never be truly free. Yet if we layer that awareness with shame and judgment, no meaningful change can ever be made.
Curiosity is about softening the sharp edges that keep us stuck in old patterns that no longer work. It’s about self-forgiveness and compassion for the desperation we feel when life is uncertain, and we are grasping for answers.
The magic of curiosity is that it has the power to bring us back to the present and back to ourselves. From there, our minds and our bodies start to settle, and we can be with the only truth that matters — the truth of what the current moment is bringing to us in all its complexity and all its simplicity. This is the paradox of Truth with a capital T. Nothing is true and everything is. The only certain thing is uncertainty.
Everything changes for us when we start to look at the world with a willingness to see things differently — especially the parts we tend to look at with anger, doubt, and an insatiable hunger for more information. We start to let go of the world as seen through our fearful minds and start to see it through our open hearts. From there, we can start to alchemize our fear into love, our certainty into curiosity, and our truth into Truth.
- What if the opposite of this were true? Can I find any examples, however small, where that’s the case?
- Why do I believe I know the truth of this situation? What is the evidence that everyone would agree it’s factual?
- How would my life be different if everyone agreed with me on this?
- Are there any reasons I might be unwilling to see this another way?
- When I think of myself being right about this, how do I feel?
- When I think of other people being wrong about it, how do I feel?
- How do I feel when I imagine a world in which the opposite is true — it turns out I’m wrong and others are right?
- What reasons might someone have for believing the truth is something different from what I believe?
- What are the consequences of this truth? Who does it serve?
These thought experiments allow us to loosen our attachment to our truth needing to be the right one. As Byron Katie, a self-help practitioner, said, “I didn’t let go of my stressful thoughts. I questioned them, and then they let go of me.”
When we are curious about our thoughts, this allows us to become the observer and witness to the mind’s constant chatter and its need to always be right. We are an information-hungry society; yet it seems the more information we feed ourselves, the hungrier we seem to get.
Our need for “the facts” can become an addiction because every time we get a hit of information, our brains secrete dopamine, the neurochemical that fuels the brain’s reward system. Curiosity pulls us away from our bottomless hunger to binge on data until we can nail down the truth. It helps us to be present in the moment where we can find freedom from urgency and the need to judge and categorize our worlds. Curiosity brings a sense of openness, play, and creativity and allows us to begin to relax and see ourselves and our world with new eyes and a beginner’s mind.
We can’t change what we’re not aware of. Therefore, without self-awareness, we can never be truly free. Yet if we layer that awareness with shame and judgment, no meaningful change can ever be made.
Curiosity is about softening the sharp edges that keep us stuck in old patterns that no longer work. It’s about self-forgiveness and compassion for the desperation we feel when life is uncertain, and we are grasping for answers.
The magic of curiosity is that it has the power to bring us back to the present and back to ourselves. From there, our minds and our bodies start to settle, and we can be with the only truth that matters — the truth of what the current moment is bringing to us in all its complexity and all its simplicity. This is the paradox of Truth with a capital T. Nothing is true and everything is. The only certain thing is uncertainty.
Everything changes for us when we start to look at the world with a willingness to see things differently — especially the parts we tend to look at with anger, doubt, and an insatiable hunger for more information. We start to let go of the world as seen through our fearful minds and start to see it through our open hearts. From there, we can start to alchemize our fear into love, our certainty into curiosity, and our truth into Truth.
Amy Beth Acker, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, mindset coach, author, and poet specializing in working with high-achieving women who struggle with anxiety, people-pleasing and perfectionism. Her first book, The Way of the Peaceful Woman: Awaken the Power of You, Create a Life You Love, and Set Yourself Free, is excerpted HERE. Her writing on personal development has been published widely. She is also a published poet and regular contributor for Sanctuary.
