Curiosity didn’t kill any cats. I am pretty sure of it. Cats are intrinsically curious and discerning. I can’t imagine them ever steering away from their true nature because of a warning from a human that it could kill them. “I have nine lives,” I envision them uttering in response as they turn and strut off, wiggling their butt on their path to curiosity. Off into the night with their nine lives maybe they can live on the edge a bit, their desperation in near death experience leading to ultimate discovery. 

When you are curious you learn

When you are desperate you discover

Mooji

Our relationship with growth is a funny thing. We are always growing, ever changing. It’s the natural state of being, even in the stillness we are still in motion. We strive for growth, but fear change. The relationship we have with control playing out in how we would like to cultivate ourselves. Choosing the destination we would like to end up in, trying to control the future and, by this essence, moving it from possibility into the past. 

There are a few ways that growth comes about. Steady and also sudden. Whatever the cause, trauma, significant event or just a sudden waking up nudged by the smallest sight. What I am experiencing greatly at the moment is that whilst learning and understanding builds over time, realisation is instantaneous. Suddenly something can shift into embodiment that has mulled around in your mind for some time. A leap of lightness, an AH-HA moment, a move into alignment. 

Curiosity is integral to creating shifts within me. I am constantly curious, about myself, about my surroundings, about others and what they are showing to me. It is how I learn and grow. 

My path of greatest discovery, saying no to all that wasn’t serving me and leaving the life I knew in London behind three years ago, was born out of desperation. Desperate to discover myself and all the love and joy I knew was within me. To step outside of the box that I was cowering in and trust that there was a greater unknown to be discovered. 

Living in the unknown is feeling increasingly natural these days and I have a sense of excitement and curiosity for how things will unravel. Curiosity is certainly something that I have learnt to cultivate. 

Its lead me to realise just how much society conditions us from an early age. Praised and reprimanded, given a mould to fill, a selection of tick box options down the schedule of life. Ironing out the awe, wonder and play of living freely in the moment as ourselves and letting life find its way to us. 

We get taught to not ask too many questions and to accept the way things are, as a way of being controlled and accepting unhappiness. We get taught to strive and to sacrifice our joy for longer term goals. “I’ll be happy and fulfilled when…” or “After I’ve suffered for a few more years I’ll finally deserve to smile”. 

We have been taught to accept that happiness is born of unhappiness. That after making it through enough hardship we will have earnt our badge of joy. We have forgotten that whilst some sufferings are the beauty of life helping us to grow, some we are actually choosing. 

“… the idea of putting pressure on ourselves to strive for our goals now so that we can feel the rush of reaching them later, is as bizarre and misguided a life strategy as hitting ourselves in the face because it feels good when we stop.” 

Michael Neil, The Inside-Out Revolution: The Only Thing You Need to Know to Change Your Life Forever

Living for a sense of achievement, striving for an end goal isn’t happiness. Happiness isn’t something you can earn, it’s a way of living and being. It’s the thoughts you choose, the actions you take. It’s letting your true nature guide your direction, ensuring that wherever you are headed, the journey takes care of you, nurtures you soul. That every choice that your adult self makes, nurtures you inner child’s true essential nature.  

We don’t need to overcomplicate it by getting attached to the way things are or the way we want them to be. Rather just get curious about discovering what is out there. About exploring the unknown and our thoughts resting in this moment alone. What if it can simply be about trust? Trust in following our joy, our truth, that place of stillness and being where everything else falls away. 

One of my favourite things about this island is watching people dance. Dance their own unique, extraordinary array of moves. I could watch for hours as individuals express their souls through movement. The same music but such different expressions of life. On the beat, off the beat, twirling, gliding, popping, fizzing, melting into their selves, into the dancefloor and their community. 

My friends were joking the other day that you can tell how “spiritual” a community is by the number of ecstatic dances there are per week. There is one here at least daily. Before arriving in Thailand some months back, I hadn’t even known what one was. 

For those of you who are life me a few months back, Ecstatic dance is, on a simple level, a clean and sober dance. No phones, no intoxicants, no judgement. On a deeper level, it’s a meditative inner dance, learning to connect to who you are, how you want to move, how you want to connect with others and a practice of dropping the ego and allowing yourself to be vulnerable. It’s about closing your eyes and moving in a room full of others, doing their own dance, and relinquishing awareness or concern over what it looks like. It’s about allowing yourself to feel how the music moves you and letting it take over. It’s about getting out of your head and into flow. It’s about allowing yourself to see and be seen as you and others are. It’s about experiencing how you move when you climb down out of your mind. 

I felt like I manifested Pyramid Sunday ecstatic dance here. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake up on the weekend and spend the morning dancing completely sober in the jungle, I had thought before hearing such a thing existed. 

I remember being pretty self-conscious the first time I went. This pyramid in the middle of the jungle filled with bold and beautiful people dripping in sweat as they set their spirits free on the dancefloor. The eye contact with each other as they allowed their inner animals to take form, the floating together and alone through the space left me thinking, “I want that.” 

And I know that I have it because I can see it. Everything in my awareness is already a part of me. If I can see it, then I can be it. I felt so curious about the path to this inner freedom they embodied. I wanted to discover this level of joy through simply being myself.  

I practiced. I set intentions. I returned and I danced. 

They say be around the people you want to become. Get curious and discover their worlds. Spend time with people who are what levelling up looks like to you. It speeds up your path to embodying it. 

And that’s what’s happened. I hung around in what I wanted enough, I practiced, played and now I am my dance. I can hold eye contact smile beaming twirling, exploding, beaming with joy FEEEEELING it all. Out of my head and into my heart. Brimming with joy. 

What the curiosity taught me was that there wasn’t so much really to learn, only to be.

In honour of dancing, curiosity and discovery of things that fill me with small and big joy, for this week I’ll leave you with this: a harvest of my love and a question… 

But tell me, beloved, what do you love? 

I love that on those days, when the light greets my eyes and dreams call me not to leave them, that I have the power to choose. I love the feeling of choosing life and feeling it choose me in response, as it always does, gently smiling in the arms of appreciation. 

I love to dance and I love to share my dance with the eyes and souls of others. I love to close my eyes inward, connecting to the energy light and dark within me, and play with my parts. Letting the soft, gentle angel share her glow, the wild woman rise up raucous and the maiden and priestess infuse interchangeably. Twirling and skipping, exploding and holding space for whoever wants to come out to play. 

I love watching spirits come alive through movement. Like a genie from a bottle, coming out from hiding with gentle encouragement. To watch the expression of life through someone else’s soul. Their expression of existence, sharing the small but significant hole the universe would notice without their presence.  

I love the contrast and collaboration of souls dancing to the same sounds. Joined in music but extraordinarily individual. Preciously picking the commas and full stops in the flow through the surrounding air. Intertwining and unravelling simultaneously. 

I love to watch a shape move across the dancefloor. An idea, the action of imagination alive in the room, transmuted consciously and unconsciously in appreciation and acceptance. In awareness of not being alone. In awareness of being connected and sharing the dance. This elegant push and pull of life. 

I love that my dance is free. Free from the inside out. Free in all circumstances and environments. Free in not knowing where my body will move next, in all directions without destination. Free in trust that my body will move however the music calls it, finding its own rhythm, in its own way. In dancing the dance that only I can dance, I am free.