by Cynthia Watts Murphy
One bright sunny day, I opened my 17 year old daughter’s bedroom door to find her under the covers, sobbing uncontrollably, while gasping to catch her breath. I walked toward her, wanting to console and connect with her, but the closer I got, the farther away she sank, into her covers and into emotional isolation.
Offering words of, “I love you”, “I understand you are in pain”, “Calm down”, or even, “I want to help you”, felt like a weak, outsider’s attempt to fix her suffering, skimming over the fact that I lacked a recognition of her deeper struggle. I could see that persisting would create an even greater rift between us.
This wasn’t new, although it had been infrequent. Anxiety and panic attacks were sometimes triggered by her diagnosed difficulty in verbalizing what she wanted and needed.
A part of me was silently screaming, “reach out, hold her, make her pain go away”, but another part of me whispered, “give her space”.
I had a Pilates class to go to, so I left, closing her door behind me. Scanning my wealth of experience as a mother for a tool to help my beautiful, struggling daughter, I felt torn and inept.
Nothing. No ideas.
Driving home from Pilates, scouring my heart and brain for solutions, I came to a point of clarity. Using my intellect to figure out a “fix” to my daughter’s problem was insufficient.
Sitting, waiting at a red light, around the corner from my house, felt like an eternal pause.
Since I couldn’t come up with a way to help my daughter, surrendering to my ignorance, in that moment, was the wise choice and as it turns out, the doorway to healing.
My training as a coach has taught me, the quality of my life is determined by the questions I ask. By asking powerful questions, in essence being curious, you bypass the limitation of the intellect and access the infinitely creative genius, which knows all answers.
As Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes,….”
In a state of surrender, instead of continuing to ask, “what can I do?” I asked myself a different question, “I wonder…hmmm… what would love do in this situation?” And I stayed in the question.
What felt like an ocean of time later, an idea sparked itself into my mind, “write a note to your daughter saying you don’t understand, but you’d love to be there for her and you’d be willing to just listen to her.” That’s when the light turned green.
Inspired, I wrote the note, slipped it under her bedroom door and went downstairs onto the deck.
Ten minutes later, my daughter emerged, sat with me and maturely opened up, impeccably articulating her experience of helplessness and frustration and her request to be heard.
Why is this important to you?
If you’re not currently facing a significant problem, one you have no idea how to solve, it’s likely you will at some future point, find yourself, “up the creek without a paddle”. Solving your most pressing problems using the brilliant resource of your intellect is good, but doesn’t always come through with the most elegant, simple answer and can feel like an arduous struggle.
Gay Hendricks, relationship expert and best selling author, talks about, “wondering into the space”. Socrates says, “Wisdom begins in wonder.”
Have you ever wondered, that maybe your answers lie in shifting your relationship with the problem, by asking a different question?
Are you willing to experiment with accessing your infinite genius?
There is a transformative power in wondering and in asking a highly calibrated question. The next time you meet with a problem you cannot fathom how to solve, employ the wisdom of Einstein and Socrates, by asking, “I wonder… What would love do?
Cynthia is a Certified Life Mastery Consultant and B.A. in Sports Medicine and Dance. She can be reached at cynthiawattsmurphy@gmail.com and on Facebook at Cynthia Murphy Coaching, @bigwins4you.
