The Power of Living in Questions

In the past few blogs, we have been exploring together the power of living in questions. As Gertrude Stein once said, “The power of questions isn’t in the answers. It is in the questions themselves.” Living in questions is one of the most healing tools I have found in my life to come out the reactive, struggling mind into a mind that is fully engaged with life.

In the last blog, we explored Check-in Questions, which help us to be compassionately curious about what is going on right now. Another way of working with questions is to ask what I call Open-Ended Questions. I often use this type of question when my mind is in such resistance that it rebels against using Check-in Questions.

In Open-Ended Questions, we are not looking for answers. Instead we are opening ourselves so that answers can come to us from the deepest and wisest parts of ourselves. Maybe you are saying, “You must be crazy – ask a question and not look for an answer? That is insanity. I don’t have time for this; I’m too busy trying to figure it all out.” But if you watch carefully, you will see that looking for answers keeps you caught in your head, left only with your own limited understanding. Lost in the search for answers to our lives, we miss the power of the questions themselves.

The power of Open-Ended Questions comes to us when we realize that life is a field of intelligence. Everywhere we look, we see its handiwork, whether it is the dance of an electron, the spiral that is found in the DNA molecule, galaxies and shells or the unfolding of the new human being from a cell that is so tiny you can’t see it with the naked eye.

This intelligence is beyond the ability of our limited human minds to comprehend. If you doubt that, consider your body. It is made up of more than thirty trillion cells that all work together with barely a thought from you. Even to begin to grasp this astounding cooperation and creativity, imagine every person on Earth working with everybody else for the common good of the whole. Hard to imagine? But that wouldn’t even begin to come close to what your body does. It would take over sixteen thousand Earths, each with 7.5 billion people, all working together, even to approximate what your body does every day.

Although we may not be able to comprehend the working of the vast Intelligence at the heart of life, we can partner with it through asking open-ended questions. We need to understand that though we don’t look for the answer, we can still expect an answer. In fact, asking Open-Ended Questions guarantees an answer. To ask a question without looking for the answer literally creates a vacuum in the universe. It is a law of physics. The intelligence of the universe rushes into the vacuum of an open-ended question, and the answer automatically, in its own time, condenses out of the void and into our lives.

When I began to live in Open-Ended Questions, a wonderful truth became clear to me: problems and solutions are two sides of the same coin, and they always show up together. The resolution to every problem we have ever had or ever will have is nestled in the heart of the challenge, and life waits for the spaciousness of a question. Asking this type of question signals the universe that we are willing to listen to the truth and the wisdom that comes with every challenge in our lives.

This type of question doesn’t work in linear time — a question followed an answer. Answers will come in their own time and their own way. I’ve received them while reading a novel in which one sentence stands out from the rest, almost as if I were reading the whole book just to receive those few words. I’ve also overheard conversations in the grocery store in which a few words pierced my unknowing and answered my question. Answers also come in dreams, while I’m taking a shower or cooking dinner. They can come with startling clarity or arrive gradually like the dawning of a day.

The art of trusting that the intelligence of the universe will answer our questions comes to each of us in its own time and in its own way. Slowly we move beyond our doubt that the universe awaits our questions. We then see through the subtle but very strong illusion that we are in charge. And finally, we discover the patience to wait for the answers to come.

One of the wonderful things about using Open-Ended Questions is that you don’t have to know what is going on, what you are feeling, or even what kind of answer you want. You also don’t have to have a concept of an intelligence that is waiting for the opening of a question. You don’t even have to trust that it will answer you. All you need to do is ask and let the question go, and the answer will show up in the vacuum created by your question. The beauty of asking Open-Ended Questions, allowing the universe to answer rather than relying on your own limited intelligence, is that you don’t just get an answer. The answer becomes part of you. There is a huge difference between understanding something with your heads and understanding it with your whole being. As the answer lives you, you then experience true partnership with life.

Here are some possible open-ended questions:

• What do I need to do or be that is for my highest good?
• What Is asking to be seen?
• What am I ready to see?
• How do I give this space to be?
• How can I open my heart to this?
• What Is the way through this?
• What am I resisting?
• How can I be with this?
• What do I need to love right now?
• What am I really hungry for?
• What is the kind choice here?
• What is the wise choice here?
• How do I not hate and fear this?
• What are the treasures hidden in this experience?

I explore these questions in my book, The Gift of Our Compulsions. This blog is much too short to cover them in depth, so here is a link to the chapter on The Healing Power of Questions if you want to explore them further.