Hey we are talking about CURIOSITY! You might be getting the cue that it's my favorite word, concept, prescription, process, skill, homework.... Curiosity is the underlying mechanism of somatic tracking, the cornerstone practice of pain reprocessing. In this episode I share some of my thoughts and a little practice about this foundational piece of my mindbody coaching. Let's embody change together.
I didn't go into this in depth in this episode but if there was an antidote to fear it's not surety, but curiosity.
We can't always guarantee any result, our bodies are designed to feel things. So trying to live an entirely pain free life is unrealistic. So instead of striving for a singular goal of getting rid of a symptom or a sensation, we cultivate a quality of loving attuned attention which helps break the pain-fear-pain cycle and mess up the prediction in the brain's predictive code. It's a kind of curiosity that's not about finding the RIGHT answer but the kind of curiosity that expands our senses, knowing, familiarity and awareness of our conditioned responses, associations and presumptions that our brain and nervous system uses to keep us safe.
If you want to get curious about what mindbody coaching is all about let's chat.
Book a free half hour curiosity call with me - https://calendly.com/paincoachdeb
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Website - https://www.thecuriositycure.coach/
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity so you can feel more better more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:58] Hello, it's Deb from the Curiosity Cure and, um, I wanted to talk about curiosity, just like what I mean by it. The first thing that I want to say about curiosity, it's one of those things, I guess, like compassion, it sounds nice as if it's not meaningful or it doesn't do anything right. So in the land of pain, right? When you are experiencing pain, we are trained through this medical model that we will go somewhere and receive something that will do something to our bodies. Um, so if we get, and then we get a medication, right? So that's going to do something to the pain receptors or do something to the inflammation.
[00:01:52] And then there's also, um, injections or surgeries or other kinds of interventions, even getting a massage. I used to be a massage therapist and people would often come to me cause I could do something to their body that would help them feel better. So there's a fixing mindset around pain.
[00:02:16] We want to have a remedy. We want it, the pain to go away, the kind of traditional model of pain. So we're never really like, Hmm, you know what I should do? Let me just get curious about this pain. So I get it that being curious about pain doesn't sound like anything you want to do.
[00:02:46] It doesn't sound like fun. Uh, it doesn't sound like it'll help you feel better. It sounds like a waste of time, so I kind of just want to admit that, like, 100%. It does not sound like it's going to be effective, except when we look at the science, it's actually tremendously effective.
[00:03:08] So that's the fun part, right? Like that's to me, the fun and interesting and weird part about science and about our brains and about the mind body connection is that it's actually a bit of a paradox. And so the faster and the harder that we're trying to get out of pain, and maybe next week, I'll actually go more into primary pain, the IDC 11, like primary pain, secondary pain, mixed pain, kind of these categories.
[00:03:42] So let's just say that, chronic pain like transitions from acute to chronic, like if you've had acute pain, it can transition from acute to chronic and it becomes a learned experience by the brain. So it, the, the places where in our brain from fMRIs that are being kind of lit up when they're looking at people's brains who are experiencing pain, experiencing long term pain, they see it in the learning centers. They don't see it in the somatosensory motor cortex. And I am not a neuroscientist. I just read neuroscience for fun. So I'm going to get all the brain words wrong, until I like actually challenged myself to get them right. But I understand the concepts, pain is decided by the brain, all of it, all pain all the time and so it's in this one part of the brain that's related to the thing that's hurting until it's not, until it becomes learned, then it's not in the part of the brain that's related to the thing that's hurting. It's actually in the learning part of the brain. So this is the fun, cool, interesting, weird stuff about science that helps us feel better, right?
[00:05:00] The whole point of this is not just to learn some cool things. Learning cool things is fun! But this is really about feeling better. This is about using cool science things to help you feel better and retrain your brain from chronic pain. What we do know now through the work of the Boulder Back Pain Study and there's Studies about asymptomatic, imaging where they show like lots of people have degenerative changes in their body and they don't have any pain. So there's a lot of storytelling that we are unraveling about what is normal for our bodies and where pain comes from. The reason I named my podcast, The Curiosity Cure is at the heart of pain reprocessing is curiosity.
[00:05:58] So to become Curious and start to reduce our fear of pain, reattribute the source of pain away from the body towards the mind, towards the brain. And we do that in a bunch of different ways. First of like tracking our pain, like noticing when do I have it? When don't I have it? Does it change? Does it come and go? The original assessment, which we rule things out. And you do that with your medical providers. And once things are ruled out, then we begin the exploration. The main tool of, of pain reprocessing is somatic tracking and all somatic tracking is, is a process by which we become curious about the sensations that we're having and we reduce our threat response to it.
[00:06:56] So we work on fear. And then we expand this concept out to anything that we are experiencing as a threat, as a stressor, as danger. Curiosity without judgment is the mechanism by which we do that. And it's hard. Because we're designed to judge and we're designed to fear and pain is like a communication.
[00:07:27] It's a motivator to get us to do, stop doing things, right? If you put your hand on a hot stove and you didn't feel pain, your hand would. You know, you'd have no more skin and you'd have no more, flesh basically. Right? Uh, so pain is there to cue you to take action, to do something different. And now we understand like, it's not a one to one relationship with the, like where you feel pain is what's being cued to be different.
[00:08:00] So curiosity it is a process of attending to, looking at, wondering, pondering, being in amazement and awe. Even neutrally narrating what you are experiencing. So if you were having a headache, you kind of wouldn't even use the word headache, right? You'd be like, I have this throbbing sensation, over here, wherever, and you could even close your eyes and bring this observer observing self.
[00:08:40] I like to also think of the observing self as somebody who's really loving, who's really on your side, who's really showing up with compassion. Why not bring love? Right? Because oftentimes we have, you know, all kinds of unhelpful messages about pain.
[00:09:03] Like we did it to ourselves or it's our fault or, there's something wrong with me. So I just think if we bring some love to the process, we will just get to experience more love. So when we go in and bring this loving, curious, nonjudgmental witness to our experience and then just start to describe it to ourselves. Our experience of it changes. We just get to notice what happens. So there becomes this kind of great unraveling of the learning because the brain is a predictive organ, the brain is always giving us the experience that it believes we're expecting to have until that belief or that prediction gets interrupted and gets updated with something else.
[00:09:57] And what we're always trying to update it with is an experience of not pain. Part of the process of becoming curious. is even just having the idea that being curious is actually a therapeutic process, is actually the process of change. We start there with just that invitation into curiosity, just to try it on.
[00:10:25] Just to be like, if it was like a hat that I really loved, like you'd kind of maybe wear it all the time. Like, how would you invite curiosity into your life?
[00:10:37] You could start with things that are not even about you at all, which might be the very best place to start because sometimes when we just try to go in and like do the activity and it's hard, one, we just think it doesn't work like it's a bunch of bullshit or that there's something wrong with us or we're doing it wrong or whatever. So it's like, start, start where you are. It's definitely weird. Like I just want to say it's weird. I love it. I think I love it because it's weird. I love it because it's like mysterious.
[00:11:11] And also because I'm like a really controlling person, a really controlling person, uh, that it is. Something that's kind of out of my control, right? Because when I'm witnessing, I'm not trying to change or fix. Even I can witness my desire to change or fix or control, but as I am bringing a loving quality to that witnessing it becomes easier to let go of trying to control everything, trying to manage everything, trying to manage every sensation, and then the whole thing, the whole house of cards just comes down.
[00:11:53] So we can start by observing with curiosity, anything, something in nature, here's my coffee mug can even look at that and just think about it. Look at the shape of it and the size of it and the colors and even just noticing what comes up when I look at it.
[00:12:16] Noticing the sensations in my body. Well, that's going back to my body, but I'm like a really body person. So that's, I don't know, like, that's why it clicks for me, but even just starting to notice things. And even if you're noticing any kind of thoughts that want to take you away, just noticing that.
[00:12:42] Noticing any thoughts about any judgment that comes up and just noticing that and not judging even your judging, right? Creating this foundation of curiosity and letting that become your guide towards change. And now, I didn't Google this before, but I'm going to do it right now. Because it's fun to do, like, what are the meanings of things, of words, right?
[00:13:15] Because words and meaning and understanding, help us contextualize what we're experiencing. Aha, here we go. Curiosity, from the dictionary, is a strong desire to know or learn something. Also, it says it is a strange or unusual object or effect.
[00:13:38] So like a curiosity, which is more like the similar words are peculiarity, oddity, strangeness, um, idiosyncrasy, and, um, Hold on, I'm going to take a sip.
[00:13:55] I kind of love that because I was talking about how weird using curiosity is. Developing curiosity is kind of weird and unusual. So it's both like curiosity and curiosity. It's a way of attending to what is in this moment. And it's not about any spiritual practice for some people this is a part of a spiritual practice.
[00:14:28] What I'm inviting people into using curiosity for is just Because you're human. Like, that's it. That's enough. It's not about obtaining any kind of higher state. It's not about becoming a better person. It's not really about anything other than this is a scientifically proven method for changing your pain and for changing your brain.
[00:15:03] I think that that's enough. One of the things I notice is sometimes we make simple things complicated because there's a kind of that hero's journey that we get sold on where we actually have to earn the remedy or earn wellness or earn something, by doing great feats.
[00:15:25] And what if that's not true? What if actually we can just practice this and move all of that kind of storytelling and narrative aside. Now it can be really fun to achieve great things and to go on a hero's quest about healing. But I would just want to say it's not necessary.
[00:15:46] Like the beautiful thing about curiosity is its simplicity. So your homework is to start to practice becoming curious. So this could be picking something in your house. Like it could even just be if you have a pet, pets are great to be curious about.
[00:16:03] Right? Just like noticing them, looking at their fur, feeling what it feels like making a sensory awareness and just spending a few moments a minute just connecting with what is. And then noticing what your brain is doing, what your body is doing. And if you start to notice things that feel positive for your body, like maybe you're able to take a deeper breath, maybe your shoulders drop, maybe your neck that was bothering you isn't bothering you right now.
[00:16:41] Just notice that, right? And then we start to build a evidence sheet about this quality of wellness so that when we are working on pain reprocessing, when we're working on experiencing sensory experiences differently, we actually have a lot of evidence to build on, but that's. Later, down the road, we don't have to be in a rush.
[00:17:08] That's my homework suggestion to you is developing some curiosity. And if you are more advanced, if you've read Alan Gordon's book, The Way Out, if you understand the mind body process a little more, then maybe your homework is actually to do some somatic tracking and that would look like just observing some sensation in your body.
[00:17:37] So like, okay, I'm going to notice my right hip and just noticing I have to do it with my eyes closed. So sorry if you're watching this on YouTube, my eyes are closed. So just noticing there's like a, a little throbbing and it's maybe got a kind of a yellowy color. And I'm noticing, actually what I'm noticing is this sense of gripping and holding and watching that yellowy color and it's starting to change and it's kind of getting off white and then there's this like red, has maybe a red circle in the middle of this spot.
[00:18:22] And I'm just going to notice that. And keep breathing. I'm just looking at that red circle. Watching it kind of fade.
[00:18:32] It's hard to not want to try to make something happen. So I will say that. And you can even notice that when we're trying to make something happen. And later I will talk about in hypnosis how we do some change work in the process of somatic tracking, but let's just start with the very beginning, which is slowing down, taking a moment, becoming curious, whether it's inward in your own body or out of your body, something that you can see, touch, smell, smells a little hard, but yeah, basically like see or touch are the, the main senses that I think work really well with this. And get curious and really let it fill you, fill you up because even though it's outside of you, your perception of it is inside of you. It's happening in your brain.
[00:19:38] Our eyes don't really see. It's our brain that sees. It's our brain that hears. It's our brain that touches, right? It's this collaboration of the parts of our body that give us our full human experience. So bringing the awareness of your brain into this process of being human, I think is for me has been so tremendously powerful, transformative, and that's what's helped me help other people.
[00:20:11] So I hope that this podcast is helpful to you, and I'm so grateful that you're here listening to it. And if, you are interested in working with a coach and diving more deeply into the work of pain reprocessing, of relating to your physical sensations, physical emotional sensations differently, please book a curiosity call.
[00:20:37] I am here. And I am looking forward to talking to you. Thank you.