Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the healing power of curiosity. Now you've probably heard me talk about my affection for the mind state of curiosity. I consider it to be powerful because it's the, well, what I consider to be the opposite of fear. If fear causes us to turn away, curiosity causes us to turn toward.

If fear presupposes that something is unsafe, curiosity presupposes that something is safe. And as a mind state that we can bring into our meditation practice, it has a lot of implications for our healing, growth and integration. Because when you think of all the ways that we get dis-integrated, that we further fracture the various parts within us, the parts that we think shouldn't be expressed, that feel difficult emotions that we don't like, all of that can lead to a glorified compartmentalization of who we are, where we're only showing up as a partial version of ourselves in the world. And the big work of any sort of healing and growth into the full expression of our humaness is to create an internal space where these different parts of us, at the very least, are given the permission to be seen and normalized rather than just cast it out into the shadows of our awareness. And this is where curiosity can be quite powerful because as you're going through your meditation practice, you'll inevitably come across things that are uncomfortable.

It's just the nature of engaging in a practice that is turning inward. You might have periods that are really peaceful, joyful, and loving. And then other periods of your practice, where it's like, Whoa, I'm navigating a lot. In those moments, the tendency can be to get, to further reinforce internal resistance, where we start pushing against these experiences and we want to kind of push them back into the shadows where they're not seen. But they still continue to create issues for us.

So curiosity is just this gentle mind state that allows us to meet what is here with interest, with care, with non-judgment. It just seeks to understand what is this experience like. It's not trying to fix it, make it better, make it different. And that's where the healing capacity is. If you think of one of the things a good therapist does, they create an environment for, for another person to, to express themselves fully, to feel safe, to be seen, for all the different aspects of them, to be able to come to the surface and held in a compassionate environment.

Well, you can do that internally. And curiosity is the mind state that, that communicates that to these parts of us that are so used to being pushed away. So when you notice these experiences arise in your practice, and in your day to day life, you can just ask yourself. What is it like to feel this? What is this experience like? What am I noticing? And do you hear the difference in that versus something like, why is this here or this shouldn't be here. What's wrong with me for feeling that? All of that further disintegrates us.

And what we're interested in is more wholeness, more integration, more full embodiment of all the different aspects of ourselves. That is how we grow into full, embodied, expressed human beings. So thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation. And see if you could bring a little bit more curiosity to your practice.

Talk to you soon.