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Over the past three weeks, you’ve added three tools to your meditation toolkit: diligence, patience, and kindness. Today, tool number four: curiosity. A perfect companion to the other three tools, curiosity is what keeps you open to learning from your meditation experience.

There’s a commonly-held misconception that meditation is the practice of clearing thoughts from your mind. It’s not. Meditation is the practice of accepting whatever comes up in the present moment, thoughts included, without judgement. There’s a lot to be learned by observing how thoughts come and go and how we habitually react to them, but you have to be willing to sit with all the things that come up, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral and notice them for what they are.

This is where curiosity comes in. Curiosity is about being open to the experiences that arise during meditation. Like patience and kindness, curiosity is particularly useful when negative experiences creep up. Why? Because most of us have a deeply ingrained habit of avoiding all things negative. We don’t want to sit with them, accept them, and learn from them. We prefer to avoid them. Curiosity allows us to learn even when the experience isn’t as pleasant as we want it to be.

Even on days when you can’t get motivated to sit, or when meditation seems boring, it is valuable to sit and practice. Try turning toward your boredom or your lack of motivation with curiosity. Be open to learning from it. 

Curiosity can also help us learn during pleasant experiences. In the first toolkit episode about diligence, I pointed out how important it is to apply diligence when meditation feels like it is going well. When you feel relaxed and calm in meditation, you might start to become complacent. You might sit and bask in the pleasantness, engaging with in and letting it lead you away from your focus instead of simply observing it. If you become curious about the way you react to pleasant situations, you can learn more about yourself.

I’ve been defining curiosity as openness to experience. It’s important to note that being curious doesn’t mean engaging with or following thoughts during meditation. And, it doesn’t mean analyzing your experiences, either. Meditation provides insight through simple observation of what is happening in the present moment. Curiosity is just a willingness to sit with those present moment experiences to allow the observations to take place.

That doesn’t mean, however, that meditation has to be a somber, serious practice. You can play a little while making observations.

Why don’t you take a comfortable meditation posture, and I’ll show you how to play

For a 12-minute guided meditation where you’ll practice getting curious about your breath, forward the podcast or the video above to 3:29

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