Can you remember the last time you really questioned something about your life? Were you content with the answers?
What if you disrupted the way you contemplate life’s bigger questions and changed how you listen for the deeper answers that live within you? We all have capacity for richer answers and one of the most powerful tools that can lead us there is to learn to Live in the Question.
What does it mean to Live in the Question and why is it important?
Every day we are living out the answers we have chosen for ourselves; by naming things too quickly or assuming we know all the answers. This unexamined way of being limits the expansiveness of our possibilities.
Living in the Question means that you allow a question to arise long enough to notice a wider and richer map of insights; all the while you become a neutral observer to your own experiences. You become your own insightful guide experiencing a dance between what you think you know and what needs to become known to you.
In this observer role, you suspend time and space, watching and listening as answers reveal themselves. This lets the question stay a question, rather than become an answer right away. Which keeps us in a state of curiosity and creativity leading us to bend, grow, and expand.
As questions arise, hold them in your mind, capture them…write them down. As you move through your day, hold the question without immediately grasping for the answer. Imagine the answers are suspended in mid-air and notice how you think or how you feel. Ask yourself:
- What is rising up or resonating within me?
- What patterns are emerging?
- Are the answers what I thought I knew? Are they what I hoped for?
As you listen for the answers you may notice they do not look the way you thought or expected.
This is where Living in the Question opens into a pivotal moment.
Often, they come in a form that isn’t recognizable. Do not turn away. Travel with it just a little longer. Elongate your trust and stay open. Look past your own judgements or bias and let in what needs to be known. The answer will arrive in front of you at just the right time and in just the right moment, even if it doesn’t ‘look’ the way you hoped.
Living in the Question takes you just beyond what you know of yourself today. It is an experience that offers very powerful living.
So, dance between your inner experience and the outer world around you, carry the question with more wonder and awe, and mute the urge to name things so quickly.
I invite you to Live in the Question. Let it help you uncover the newness within because you are evolving, as the question is evolving within you.