Allow Yourself Time to be Curious

Tara Sophia Mohr sent an email blog yesterday called "The most underestimated Power Source."  In this blog, she writes about training to be a life coach and being given a slightly radical homework assignment by her teacher.  The teacher asked the students to lay on the floor gazing up at the bottom of their kitchen sinks for fifteen minutes. The purpose of this assignment was to teach, or re-teach, curiosity. 

Tara writes that she was at a hotel at the time so she did the assignment in the hotel bathroom (very brave woman!).  She writes that she began wondering who made the sink, who installed it, how long the hotel had been around, etc, and it led to some intriguing conversations with hotel staff.

My grandfather who died at the age of 100, always touted curiosity.  His initials spelled out the word CAR and he used to always say to me and my sister, the C stands for curiosity and the A stands for awareness.  We were too "mature", back then, to listen to life lessons so neither of us remembers if R meant anything, but I am guessing it probably did!  ('Regret' for not paying attention?!)

I went into a new grocery store (new to me) the other day with my son.  It was quite a cultural grocery store, if you will, with foods I had never seen before.  I kept pointing and saying, what is that?!  What is that?!!  I felt like Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas when he leaves Halloween Town for the first time and enters Christmas. 

I found the following on anytimeyoga.com written by Tori:

"Yoga also teaches me to be curious when I’m encouraged to safely explore a pose that I think is too hard for me. Being encouraged to be curious, to explore, helps me start to figure out a posture without being invested in actually being able to do it... Were I caught up in actually doing the pose, that number of “failures” would frustrate me, probably to the point of not trying it again — or only trying it with dread (which cannot help my focus or ability). Being curious is like giving myself permission to just try and to enjoy the trying process."

Looking at asanas through the eyes of curiosity is a great lesson on the mat.  The reason I learned how to do dragonfly in the first place was because I saw a picture of it in a magazine and they called it mystery arm balance instead of dragonfly. And I stared at the picture thinking how did her foot get there?!  It was through curiosity that I figured it out.  I wonder what pose strikes that element in you?

Todd Kashden from experiencelife.com writes, "Curiosity... is all about noticing and being drawn to things we find interesting. It’s about recognizing and seizing the pleasures that novel experiences offer us, and finding novelty and meaning even in experiences that are familiar.

When we are curious, we see things differently; we use our powers of observation more fully. We sense what is happening in the present moment, taking note of what is, regardless of what it looked like before or what we might have expected it to be.

We feel alive and engaged, more capable of embracing opportunities, making connections, and experiencing moments of insight and meaning — all of which provide the foundation for a rich, aware and satisfying life experience."

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