What Is Curiosity?

WHAT IS CURIOSITY? AND WHY DOES UNDERSTANDING IT MATTER, IN GETTING OUR CHILDREN TO ‘LISTEN’? by Jilna Patel Jasani

When our 4-year-old pushes our 11-month-old...
When our 7-year-old forgets something for the tenth time….
When our 6-year-old hoards her toys...
When our 8-year-old doesn't play fair…
When our 3-year-old has a meltdown…
When our 5-year-old lies about how much screen time he’s used...

We find ourselves helpless in an emotional reaction of anger, frustration, irritation, sadness, victimhood, or shame.  So we turn to discipline to gain control.

“Stop it, or you’re going into a time out.”
“Why are you so forgetful?
“Lying is disrespectful.  Speak the truth.”
“Share, or I’m taking it away.”
“If you can’t play fair, then you can’t play at all.”
“Last time I took you, you screamed the whole time.  So this time, you’re staying home.”

We point fingers at our children and sometimes at our spouse, mother-in-law, culture, or teachers as to why our children are acting out in the way they are. We blame, control, and discipline.

But none of it works.

We continue to find ourselves in similar situations at least every few hours, if not every other day. We wonder why our children act out in the same way over and over again. Surely, it’s not our intention, because it feels exhausting and we want SO badly for our children to behave so we can find peace after a long day’s work. We witness their flailing arms and legs or hysterical cries and quickly make assumptions on why we think they’re acting that way.

He’s aggressive; he needs to be taught it’s not okay to hit…
She’s so lazy…
He is a typical toddler, he lies…
She doesn’t know how to share…
Let him cry it out; he’s so stubborn…
She needs to learn her lesson…

What if I told you our children are expressing their inability to communicate their needs? And our reactions are a result of a lack of curiosity about their needs. Or, said another way, a lack of presence and understanding.

Finding Curiosity:  
It’s the only way to find solutions to our problems.

We’re unable to clearly understand the whole picture of why we are in the position we’ve found ourselves in.  We’re unable to understand that there is more to the situation than the flailing arms and legs and the assumptions we are making. To solve this lack of understanding, we can no longer dwell on the outward projections. ​

Albert Einstein once said, “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it.  You must learn to see the world anew.” In other words, we must learn a new way of seeing things, if the one we’re in isn’t working.

But, you ask, what more is there to see? 

The answer lies in gaining a new curiosity.  After all, the opposite of projection IS curiosity. So what does this curiosity look like, in the midst of feeling angry or ashamed? What should we be asking ourselves or being curious about? 

I’ll share a personal story that illustrates this.

I hardly considered myself a religious person, let alone spiritual, when I began this work. 
I was desperate for a new way of connecting and understanding my son, Jian, which is what led me down the path of spirituality. It’s still sometimes odd for me to use that word. I prefer to say the “path to curiosity” but, at the end of the day, these are only words to relay the message I’m sharing.

My journey of choice and creation started when Jian was three. Until then, I struggled to connect with and understand him, finding myself constantly bumping heads with him; even at one and a half years old, when he was barely speaking a few words. When he was still an infant, he could sense my anxiety around wanting to be busy while I was nursing him. The moment I picked up my phone in one hand, he unlatched, showing his frustration and leaving me in physical pain.

Shortly after he turned three, I discovered the revolutionary Dr. Shefali. Her work helped me radically accept that there was something majorly wrong in all the ways I was reacting to Jian’s cautious and sensitive nature. It was creating a lot of stress in his body and mine.

What’s interesting, though, is that I intuitively knew I had a loss of understanding. I knew I had trouble connecting to him. I knew there was something missing.  But I had trouble being curious, for a fear of admitting that I needed help in being a better mom. But that’s the amazing thing about nature, you see. When we have trouble coming to the realization of our resistance on our own, nature will deliver the lesson in another form. And if we’re willing to listen, we’ll have gained our access to curiosity. In my case, it was the physical pain I suffered through nursing him.

I had more signs than I can count on two hands leading me to why I needed to become curious about another way of parenting him.  Dr, Shefali helped me realize and accept the inevitable sooner rather than later. My biggest takeaway from her was that I wasn’t the problem. The loss of curiosity or understanding that each individual has a unique and innate personality or energy state IS the problem.

Not knowing that Jian’s innate energy state was different from mine had me parenting him from only one perspective—my own energy state.

So what is an energy state and how do we recognize our own energy states or those of our children?

It takes some level of will to understand what energy is and why it’s important as parents to align our energy states to our young children to ensure they feel safe enough to collaborate and create with us.

I use the word “will,” because for someone like me, who didn’t have strong religious or spiritual beliefs, I had to first commit to learning—and then trusting—that energy can be real and at the same time unseen. It’s an invisible force of nature that transforms through lifetimes.

I write at length about how we can align our innate energy state with others, through Conscious Parenting. The basic concept is that we are born with certain innate energy states or personalities that live within our mind. 
​
These innate personalities express themselves as challenges and courage.  They are not good or bad and don’t represent the totality of our being. 
They are here to help us make sense of who we are, so that we can integrate the areas where we suffer, and work towards balancing out and becoming whole.
Let’s consider this…

Have you ever been in the mountains and suddenly felt peaceful?
Or played in snow and felt light?
Or swam in the ocean and felt meditative?
Or sat on the beach and felt relaxed?
Or stood by a waterfall and felt happy?

If the answer is yes, what you felt is the unique frequencies of energy states that different parts of nature offer. In other words, by going to the mountains, you shifted your energy state to that feeling of peace. That’s what I’m talking about. If we want to find the secrets of how to align ourselves with our children, we must first make them feel safe. They feel safe when they know we understand them. When we understand them, they create with us, not against us. But we only understand them when we understand ourselves. And we understand ourselves when we become curious what our energy state is.

Learning how to co-create the realities we desire with our child, using our new curiosity

Human beings are creatures of alignment. If we want to co-create and co-exist in the realities we each desire, it is important in a parent-child relationship that our energy states align. Our energy states are invincible. We cannot change them. We are born with them.

To help you understand, I’ll use my child as an example. Jian is more connected in being himself, in his intuition, and in his body. This shows up in his innate personalities of being creative, structured, loyal, empathetic, honest, highly intellectual, and wise. In contrast, I’m analytical, logical, and grounded in taking action. This shows up in my innate personalities of being confident, courageous, passionate, social, resilient, determined, and trusting. But in order for me to connect with his energy state, I must first soften my energy and align to his so that he feels safe enough to co-create with me. When we enter our child’s energy state, we learn new ways to see our original problems, and we begin to question things from a different perspective to help solve them.

So how do we recognize our energy states? 

We start by acknowledging every emotional reaction we experience.  Dr. Dan Siegel talks about naming our emotions to tame them. The idea behind it is to help integrate our right brain, which is responsible for the emotional reactions and our fight-or-flight response, and our left brain, which is responsible for logic and reasoning.

When we name our emotions and let ourselves feel them, we acknowledge them in order to help us find calm. We can then use logic to become curious about our emotional reactions are trying to tell us about our innate personalities. Mindfulness and breath exercises like the ones below also help us find calm.

How does my belly feel?
How has my breathing changed?
Is my jaw tight?
Is my heart racing?
What are my facial expressions?

When we turn towards such practices, we’re able to move our outward projections to inner inquiry, to calm our nervous system from a fight-or-flight response to a curious and creative one.

We begin to ask ourselves questions like...

What action did I take that might have made him feel like pushing the baby?
Who am I being, that she doesn’t feel the need to remember?
What might I have done that made him feel the need to lie?
What does this mean about how I hoard my things?
When do I play unfair?
What might I be doing that is causing her to have a meltdown?

It takes time and practice. It took me a few years to understand why mindfulness and breath exercises are an integral part of gaining a new curiosity. It’s an area I thought I could bypass by intellectually understanding the concepts, but I found I was unable to progress without it.

This practice helps you create just enough space between your thought and emotional reaction, shifting you into curiosity around why you end up in similar situations with your children.

When our 4-year-old pushes our 11-month-old, we could question how much quality time we have spent with our 4-year-old.

When our 7-year-old forgets for the tenth time, we can wonder if we could set him up with an easy system to help him remember.

When our 5-year-old lies about how much screen time he used, we could ask ourselves; when was the last time that I told him I would do something, and never did?

When our 6-year-old hoards her toys, we can consider how possessive we might be about others sharing our phone, food, or space.

When our 8-year-old doesn’t want to play fair, we can look back and think, when was the last time I asked him for his opinion?

When our 3-year-old has a meltdown, we can ask ourselves, have I asked her why she’s upset?

It takes learning about curiosity on an intellectual level first. But the real shift happens when we consciously make the choice each time we experience an emotional reaction, to move our curiosity inward, instead of outward into projections; that’s when our entire world changes. We begin to welcome problems that we thought we would never be able to solve with fluidity and ease.

I once thought I was incapable of mothering my child because everything seemed to be a struggle. Once I learned how to direct my curiosity to connect with him, it became the mission of my life to help families confidently and courageously invite conscious choice and curiosity into their lives so that they can co-create and co-exist in the freedom-filled realities they desire.

Having this ability to look inward defines how we think, act, and respond in every moment.  It defines what the next moment looks like, and the next five moments after that. 

Jilna is a Conscious Parenting Coach Certified by Dr. Shefali's Coaching Institute, co-owner of Suhaag Garden, an Event Design Company for South Asian Weddings, mother of a wonderful 7 year old, and active supporter of her son's self-directed, self-governing school, among many talents. Find more of her writing and reflections on social media! 
Instagram @JilnaPatelJasani   FB: JilnaPatelJasani    Website: jilnajasani.com