Latest / Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul / Why Your Nervous System Responds Better to Curiosity Than Criticism

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Why Your Nervous System Responds Better to Curiosity Than Criticism · Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul

• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Healing Her Story Podcast.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: If this is your first time here, welcome.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: It is such a joy and a privilege to be able to share this space with you today.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are returning, welcome back.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: I am deeply grateful for your presence and for your attention and for your willingness to explore these themes and lessons and teachings with me.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: As this episode is airing, we are also moving through Gemini season.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as we are moving through Gemini season, we are exploring the elements of Gemini energy.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in our last solo episode, we talked a lot about duality and creating new neural pathways and opening up to new experiences.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: We also talked a little bit about how breath work can be such a wonderful tool for supporting that.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Gemini, interestingly enough, is also associated with the element of air.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we're really hitting these themes on point.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got another episode today with another element of Gemini energy that we haven't discussed much yet on the show at all, I think.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really excited to dive in today.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Today on the podcast, we are exploring something.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we haven't talked about it a lot here, and I honestly don't feel like it's talked about enough in healing spaces and in the healing journey in general, which I think is a shame, honestly, because it's a really simple but fundamental shift in the healing process.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's this idea of curiosity.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: As I've continued to dive deeper into my studies around trauma, healing, the nervous system, and somatic work, this became something that felt so incredibly clear to me.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, even once I understood it intellectually, it was still really difficult to make that change myself.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to explore how curiosity is actually an essential part of the healing process, therapeutically, emotionally, biologically, and somatically.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's also research that supports this, which we'll get into later in the episode.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I first want to start by sharing a little bit about my own lived experience with this.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: I remember when I first started diving much deeper into my healing journey.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: At this point, I had already established a breath work practice.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: I had become certified at that point and started doing more online trainings and learning more.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point in my journey, I was focused primarily on helping women through health coaching.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was hosting women's circles locally here in Sacramento, often in the park, maybe.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you're listening, you were around for one of those many moons ago.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: This was a period of my life where I was really motivated to change the way I was living, like really motivated.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because before that, I had spent years working in the fitness industry as a group fitness instructor and personal trainer while I was also running my hula hoop troop at the same time.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I ran a hula hoop troop for about five years.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I did both of those things side by side for that five-year time period.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And on my busiest weeks, I was teaching maybe 15 to 20 group fitness classes a week.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was also seeing private clients, and I was doing performance gigs on the weekends.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I was also taking Adderall to keep up with all of it.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: So as you can maybe imagine, this was a really interesting and complicated period of my life.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of conflicting parts of myself that I was really trying to contend with.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of incoherence in my system because externally I looked very high-functioning and successful, but internally I was relying on coping mechanisms that were honestly not sustainable in order to maintain that lifestyle.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then the pandemic came and everything came to a screeching halt.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really the beginning of a much deeper healing process for me.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I had already started to realize that the way I was living wasn't actually working and that it wasn't aligned with who I truly wanted to be.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually I got off Adderall and I left many of my fitness jobs.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I had multiple fitness jobs, and I started working with what we would call air quotes, alternative healing modalities, to really get underneath the addiction, the overworking, and the constant striving.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what eventually led me more deeply into breath work and eventually trauma-informed care.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the trauma and for lens, excuse me, but before the trauma-informed lens came in, I still had this, I was still in this strange sort of like liminal space where I was trying so hard to change my habits and my behaviors, but I was approaching myself in a way that wasn't actually supportive of the healing process at all.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was trying to meditate more and go on more walks and scroll less and be more present and think more positive thoughts and lose weight and everything all at the same time.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever I didn't do the thing that I thought I quote unquote should be doing, I would get incredibly frustrated with myself.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was very critical of myself.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I already had this awareness around myself talk, and I started to become more aware of this inner critic, if you will.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was sort of looking back, I can see that there were deeper layers of this dynamic that I was still very unconscious to.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it kind of looked like this.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I would want to try to change a behavior, and then when I didn't change it fast enough, I would judge myself for it, and then I would try even harder to force the change, and then maybe I would do well for a little bit, and then I would fall off, usually because I would like get sick or something, and then I would get frustrated with myself again.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just stayed in this perpetual loop.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't actually creating the long-lasting change that I desired because underneath all of my attempts to heal and to change, there was still a lot of judgment.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until I started studying trauma-informed care that I began to understand why this approach wasn't working.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because every time I judged myself for behavior or judged myself for not doing something, I was actually creating more unsafety inside my system.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was relating to myself as though something was wrong with me.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when we relate to ourselves in that way, the nervous system doesn't soften, y'all.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't relax, and we don't feel safe enough to change.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Especially because if I'm being honest, many of the expectations that I had for myself were incredibly high and honestly unrealistic.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of women do that, and that is also not your fault.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: That I feel is a deep reflection of the patriarchal culture that we live in.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where curiosity began to shift everything for me.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because I started realizing that judging myself or being hard on myself wasn't making the change happen any faster.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, it was just reinforcing the very patterns that I was trying to change and heal.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: But as I started to invite in more curiosity, there started to be this space that opened up.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is such an important thing to understand.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Anything that your system is doing or not doing is a protective strategy from your beautiful, wise, miraculous system that is connected to an intelligence that goes far beyond what the mind can intellectually understand.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system is not trying to sabotage you, your body is not trying to betray you.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Your system is trying to protect you in the best way it knows how.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when we begin to understand that, curiosity naturally becomes the antidote to the judgment and the criticism.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because instead of thinking, what's wrong with me, we begin asking, inquiring, noticing.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm, this is interesting.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder why this is happening.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder what's going on here.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that tiny shift changes everything on a biological level.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of judging myself for waking up and scrolling on my phone first thing, curiosity sounds more like, hmm, interesting.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I notice I'm still reaching for my phone first thing in the morning.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder why that is.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder what my system is looking for in that.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if there's another way that I can give that to my system.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly there's space, there's an openness, and there's room for information to emerge.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because through the lens of internal family systems, also known as IFS or parts work, somatic healing and the nervous system work, all of these different lenses and modalities, they all say that everything that the body does, it does with intention.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Your body, your system, it does nothing on accident.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Everything has a reason.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that reason or intention may no longer be relevant.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It could be a strategy that's outdated, but there's still information there.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And when we move into curiosity, we become available to receive that information.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And interestingly enough, the brain loves this.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: The brain loves understanding, it loves coherence and meaning making and knowing.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So when we can allow ourselves to be curious to get more information from our system, that is when our brain can begin to soften.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is when the judgment can begin to soften.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that is when the nervous system can begin to settle because we are no longer at war with ourselves.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And getting ready for this episode, I did a little research like I always do, and it was fascinating to see how much science actually supports this.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers have found that curiosity literally primes the brain to form new neural pathways and new neural connections.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it also primes the brain to learn.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: When people become curious, the brain's reward circuitry activates, especially the areas that are connected to motivation, memory, and learning.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is huge for trauma healing because trauma creates repetitive survival pathways in our brain and in our nervous system.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And curiosity opens the brain to new information and new experiences.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the new experiences are what begin to create these new neural pathways.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: I learned curiosity also increases our dopamine, which I hadn't heard before.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And our dopamine is connected to our motivation, our engagement, our exploration, and our behavioral change.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And another really interesting piece of research that I found was that curious people tend to tolerate uncertainty and anxiety better, which honestly makes so much sense because healing does require some degree of uncertainty.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: We have to let old parts of ourselves and of our identity dissolve.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have to try new behaviors, explore new modalities, enter unfamiliar territories, and try to stay present with the emotions and things that surface as we go through that process that, you know, maybe we had avoided in the past because they're uncomfortable.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so curiosity makes that uncertainty and that discomfort that we can sometimes experience feel less threatening.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so you may be listening and thinking, okay, I understand this intellectually, but how do I just become more curious?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if you're someone who tends to be very self-critical or judgmental or perfectionist or carries a lot of shame.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I really want to acknowledge here that this can maybe be easier said than done.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I invite you to be compassionate and gentle and also sweet with yourself as you're taking this information in.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that you have haven't been approaching yourself in this way doesn't make you bad or wrong, especially if no one ever explained it to you.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: We do better when we know better.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't about shaming anyone, it's really about offering you a new pathway, a new element that you can begin to weave into your own process.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that this is really important to acknowledge as well, that in order for curiosity to emerge, there does need to be some level of safety in the body.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: This connects us deeply to that felt sense of safety episode we aired earlier in Torah season.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if you haven't listened, I'm gonna invite you to go back and get that one a listen because I walk you through the very process that helped you to uh create that felt sense of safety within.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll link that for you in the show notes if you haven't listened to it yet.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we are highly activated and anxious and overwhelmed and stuck in this sort of sympathetic fighter flight states, curiosity becomes much harder to access.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: The soil is simply not primed the proceeds of curiosity in those states.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this is exactly why the somatic work matters, because it's about using your senses and grounding and breathing and slowing down and orienting your body to that felt sense of safety.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: These practices over time do help to shift the nervous system into a more regulated state, into a more open and grounded and restful and curious state where that curiosity can begin to organically emerge, not something that you're forcing.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't because, again, you're forcing yourself to think differently, it's because your biology finally has received the information that it needs to register.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, I'm safe.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I can open because I've as I've said before, and I'll say it again and again and again, you cannot outthink your biology.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot outthink your biology.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: You just can't.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: You have to learn to work with your nervous system instead of against it.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if you'd like some support with that, I'm going to leak my free trauma recovery mini course for you in the show notes.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't always talk about it, it's always there though.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: But inside that course, I guide you through what I consider to be the three foundational pillars of trauma recovery.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And each model includes a short somatic practice designed to help your system move towards greater regulation and safety.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: This course and my work in general is much less about consuming information while there is information shared.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's really more about developing the embodied tools that help your nervous system settle into a more calm, more grounded, more curious state.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I truly see the impact of this every single day.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: I see it within myself and I see it with the women I work with as well.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this episode offered you something supportive to explore this week and over the next several weeks as we continue to move through Gemini season.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to connecting with you in the next episode.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Bye for now.