Curiosity saved my life.
Ten years ago, when I became a mother, I entered one of the darkest and most disorienting seasons I’ve ever known. I was likely experiencing undiagnosed postpartum anxiety and depression, and the transition into motherhood shook me in ways I never could have anticipated.
I loved my son deeply. That was never the question. But my body, my hormones, my identity, and my entire sense of self had been completely rearranged. Childbirth brought physical challenges I wasn’t prepared for, breastfeeding was incredibly difficult at first, and I found myself moving through each day feeling like a stranger inside my own life.
I remember looking at a photograph of myself during that time and not recognizing the person staring back at me. I had become so far removed from the version of myself I knew that even my old patterns of self criticism didn’t know where to land.
And in that space, something else appeared.
Curiosity.
Before becoming a mother, my habit would have been to judge myself harshly. I would have found all the ways I was failing, all the reasons I wasn’t good enough, all the things I should have been doing differently.
But there was no familiar inner critic waiting for me in that moment.
Instead, there was curiosity.
Curiosity didn’t arrive with an agenda. It didn’t tell me what I needed to fix or who I needed to become. It simply wondered.
"What is happening here?"
Curiosity created enough space for me to step back from my suffering and witness what was unfolding. It allowed me to become an observer rather than someone completely consumed by the storm.
And that small shift changed everything.
I don’t know what would have happened if my old narrator had taken over in that moment. I don’t find much value in imagining alternate timelines. But I do know that curiosity felt like a life preserver when I was drowning.
It felt like I had discovered a connection with something beyond my own mind.
I grew up without much connection to spirituality. In fact, I often felt skeptical of anything that pointed toward something unseen or greater than myself. But this was different. This wasn’t a belief I adopted. It was a direct experience.
For the first time in my life, I felt a relationship with something more intelligent than my own limited perspective. Something benevolent. Something that didn’t need me to have all the answers.
And I have followed that thread ever since.
Over the past decade, I’ve come to know curiosity as one of my greatest allies. It has shaped the way I move through my own life, and it has become one of the greatest gifts I bring into my work as a coach and Shamanic Reiki practitioner.
Because curiosity is not just a way of thinking.
It is a movement of life itself.
It is the openness that allows us to meet what's here without immediately trying to control it. It's a doorway into awe, wonder, and a deeper relationship with the unknown.
If you had told me ten years ago that I would one day be doing this work, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I was a new mother, sitting awake at three o’clock in the morning, holding my baby and eating Little Debbie’s just to make it through another feeding. I was trying to survive each day, and I had no idea that the path ahead of me ever would lead here.
I simply couldn’t have imagined it.
And that is how I know this path was never something I simply constructed through effort and willpower. Something else has been moving with me. Guiding me. Opening doors I never knew existed.
Call it curiosity. Call it spirit. Call it a deeper intelligence woven through life itself.
Whatever name we give it, there is something available to us that is far wiser than the small, scared voice that tries to figure everything out.
Sometimes the greatest transformation begins when we stop asking, “How do I fix this?” and start wondering, “What is being revealed?”