Dealing with anxiety: Get curious and discover your inner wonders

Yoga is uniquely positioned to be very effective for dealing with anxiety because it addresses the symptoms and sources of anxiety on multiple levels of our systems. Our yoga practice can help us shift our attention from the mind to the body, discharge excess nervous energy, balance our sympathetic nervous system, become more aware of our mental loops, and invoke a sense of curiosity about our inner state. The four yoga practices below target different aspects of anxiety and give us tools to discharge, examine, and reframe our anxious thoughts.

Get curious and discover your inner wonders

Curiosity is an innate quality that we all share. The psychologists Jordan Litman and Paul Silva describe two main flavors of curiosity: I-curiosity, which stands for interest, and D-curiosity, which stands for Deprivation. Deprivation curiosity makes you feel tense and restless; it’s an itch you need to scratch, a nagging sensation of missing out on something; the same curiosity killed the proverbial cat. On the other hand, interest curiosity represents the wide-eyed wonder of discovery; it is piqued when we are engaged and interested in learning more about something. Interest curiosity makes us feel spacious and connected. Interest curiosity is our superpower because it keeps us engaged with the world, pulls us out of our habitual behaviors, deepens our self-awareness, and fills our lives with wonder.

In this yoga practice, we will experiment with both curiosity types, Deprivation and Interest curiosity, and experience them within our bodies. Then we will bring Interest curiosity to our movements and breathing to marvel at our bodies and their abilities. We will try to sense the feeling-tone of our energy to see if it feels like a musical instrument and what kind of tune we are playing on the inside.