The Posture of Curiosity

Have you ever watched a small child examine something on the ground?

Maybe a bug, or an interesting piece of dirt, or a crack in the sidewalk that suddenly demands their full attention. Notice the posture they adopt. Knees bent or folded under. Face close. Whole body oriented toward this one small thing.

Nothing else exists for that moment — not the errands, not the schedule, not the adults waiting impatiently nearby. Just this. Just curiosity, fully embodied.

Can you remember the last time you explored something with that kind of abandon? Can you remember when you stopped dropping to the ground to check things out so intensely?

If you're like most of us, it was probably around the time you entered formal education — when learning stopped being something your whole body did and became something your mind was supposed to manage while the rest of you sat still and waited.

Here's what I find interesting: on the one hand, being a student presents its challenges. Many of us carry old wounds from educational systems that valued compliance over curiosity. On the other hand, becoming a student again — a certain kind of student — might be one of the most powerful things you can do for your wellbeing.

It all depends on what kind of student.

The Words We Carry

If you know me, you will know that I love words. I love where they come from, what they carry in their bones. When we use words with intention and understand their etymology, it can change the entire perspective of a situation.

For example, a few years ago, I stopped working with patients and clients. I started working only with students — which doesn't mean I stopped working with people. It just means we showed up in the therapeutic container differently. Here's why:

Patient comes from the Latin patiens — to suffer, to endure. There's a passivity built right into the word: I will wait here while you figure out what's wrong with me.

Client is better — there's choice involved, agency. But it's still transactional. The expertise stays outside of you.

Student comes from studere — to be eager, to pursue, to devote yourself to something.

Suffer and endure. Or pursue and devote. You can feel the difference in your body just reading those words.

That shift in perspective can be a game changer for someone pursuing wellbeing.

Learning With Your Whole Self

That child on the ground isn't just learning with her mind. Her whole body is involved — eyes, hands, breath, attention, wonder. She hasn't yet been taught to separate thinking from feeling from sensing from being.

The research backs this up. The field of embodied cognition has shown that learning isn't just a brain event — it arises from our bodily interactions with the world. Antonio Damasio's work demonstrated something similar: you can't actually think clearly without your body being in the room. Emotion, sensation, and cognition are woven together.

This is why you can understand something perfectly in your mind and still not be able to live it. The knowing hasn't moved through your whole system yet.

When I talk about becoming a student of your own life, I mean something larger than what we usually think of as learning. I mean all of you showing up — physical, mental, emotional, soul, and that cosmic bridge where you meet something larger than yourself. Five systems, all capable of learning, all waiting for your curiosity.

The Pace of Real Change

Here's something else that child knows instinctively: you can't rush wonder.

Watch her with that bug. She's not trying to get through the bug to get to the next thing. She's just with it, for as long as it takes, until something in her is complete and she's ready to move on. She has to metabolize the experience — and that takes as long as it takes.

Even though most of us have been taught differently, we actually metabolize information and experiences the way we metabolize food. In small amounts. Over time. With space between. Transfomative or Embodied Learning, which is the kind of learning that creates multidimensional change, requires a much more simple, engaged approach.

There's over a century of research on this — what scientists call the spacing effect. When we spread learning out over time rather than cramming it together, it sticks. At the cellular level, spaced learning activates the proteins needed to build long-term memories. Your brain literally creates more stable neural patterns when you give it time to integrate.

This is why even just three minutes of genuine presence, or 17 seconds of holding a positive emotion (yep, just 17 seconds) make such a big difference when they are repeated until it becomes part of you. That's the metabolic pace of becoming — small, felt, repeated moments of attention, like a child returning again and again to the same patch of ground, finding something new each time.

Why This Matters Beyond You

There's one more thing I want you to know, because it changes everything about why this kind of learning matters.

When you engage in the small simple practices that create change. You come into multidimensional coherence. When your systems are in coherently in dialogue, when you're present and curious and regulated — you change the space around you.

This isn't metaphor. Stephen Porges' research on the autonomic nervous system shows that we co-regulate each other constantly. Your nervous system is in conversation with the nervous systems around you — the people in your home, the animals on your land, even the trees you sit beneath. When you're coherent, you become a different kind of presence in every room you enter.

So your curiosity isn't just personal development. When you learn to be present with yourself the way that child is present with the bug — fully oriented, fully engaged — you create conditions for the people and places around you to settle too.

When we change, the world changes. Not as a nice idea, but as physics.

A Simple Practice

If any of this resonates, here's something to try. It takes less than five minutes:

Orient to presence. Let your eyes soften. Notice one sound, one color, one sensation in your body. Let yourself land where you are — like a child dropping to the ground because something caught her attention.

Regulate your breath. Inhale through your nose for a count of four. Exhale softly through your mouth for a count of six. Just three slow cycles.

Gather your field. Notice where your attention has scattered. Without forcing anything, invite it back. Say internally: Return.

That's it. Three steps. Three minutes. And then tomorrow, do it again.

If you want more structure, join the 30-Day Coherence Challenge which you can find either on my website or at newenglandschoolbem.org — one simple practice, once a day, for thirty days.

Less forcing. More aligning.

Let's begin.

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Dr. Stephanie Shelburne is the founder of Sacred Metabolism® and Executive Director of The New England School of Bioenergetic Medicine. She works with students — not patients — from her farm in Vermont.

Listen to this week's Bone Wisdom podcast for the full conversation.