Have you watched or read something that inspired you to pursue your passions only to be left feeling lost regarding what your purpose actually is? When it comes to finding purpose, there is often a lot of pressure and attention put on achievements and accomplishments. We start out the new year with resolve and, as you’ve heard, a couple of weeks into January, default mode resumes. Too often, purpose isn’t valued as much if it isn’t seen, tracked, rewarded, or admired by others.
When it comes to purpose, what if more value was placed on wonder rather than on achievements?
Why We Need Wonder and Where It Is Missing
A recent systematic scientific review on curiosity and wonder in childhood education by Bjerknes, et al (2023) at the University of South-Eastern Norway, highlights how important these elements are to development and learning1. Curiosity and wonder research in education has focused primarily on young children in natural sciences classes where curiosity helps engage learners in the material. Research supporting wonder and awe as complex emotional experiences in adults, in the modern scientific sense, has been on the radar only in the past decade and a half. The general focus of emotional research up to that point had been on understanding and managing difficult emotions such as sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust and only one obviously positive one: joy. More recently, other distinct positive emotions, such as compassion, desire, amusement, pride, and love have been studied as distinct emotions. Recent strides have attempted to describe formerly ineffable experiences – using language to describe what is transcendent and often indescribable — and to measure them.
How Humans Experience Awe
Wonder can often lead to awe, often defined as reverential respect. At the University of California, Berkeley, Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner (2022) published an integrated description of the complexity of what occurs when humans experience awe when it is not threat or fear-based (which elicits different responses). Neurophysiologically, many things shift. Facial muscles change, the jaw drops, eyes widen and inner eyebrows rise. Our nervous systems experience a vagal response, a calming of the stress response, along with the release of positive neurochemicals. There may be accompanying sensations such as tingling along with a systemic anti-inflammatory response. There is some evidence that there is a reduction in Default Mode Network activity, an area of the brain currently being studied for its self-reflective processes. Along with these neurophysiological patterns, there is a measurable reduction in self-focus, an increased prosocial relational connection, and more social integration which can trigger a sense of belonging. Meaning-making can increase, which is also connected to our sense of being part of something beyond our day-to-day. In sum, awe is described as a reparative experience that leads to better well-being.2
What triggers awe and how do we increase our daily dose of it?
You may already know the answer to this for yourself. If you need some reminding, Monroy and Keltner describe five categories of activities that reliably bring people awe:
1. Nature
2. Spiritual engagement
3. Music
4. Dance
5. Psychedelics
Simply observing nature’s rhythms – a season, a stream, a storm, the large croak of a small toad — or engaging in rhythms of music, chanting, or moving our bodies can lead us to a sense of awe. Psychedelic medicines have also been used for millennia in spiritual ceremony and more recently therapeutic interventions for mental health. (Griffiths et al., 2008 report that 50% to 70% of participants reported that psychedelics produced one of the most significant spiritual experiences of their lives, often reporting profound experiences of awe).
How to Practice Awe
While it is always wonderful to have science back what perhaps your intuition tells you, we all are at risk of losing a deep connection with daily wonder and awe unless we practice it regularly. It isn’t that we don’t have these muscles already, so-to-speak, it’s that we’ve forgotten these fundamental ways of existing because we are surrounded by messages distracting us from who we are and our natural sense of wonder and awe. But we can separate ourselves from the trappings of what we own, what we do, and who we know. We might need to exercise these core muscles more often. Entering each moment or task with curiosity, a slower pace, and a sense of humility can help set us up for more moments of awe.
Of course there is nothing wrong with having goals or new year resolutions, as long as we stay connected with the profundity of our essence – using our curiosity to expand, grow, and stay grounded in what matters most. Perhaps our new purpose can include experiencing wonder and awe.
The good news is that we don’t need to heli-ski to find a sense of awe. Think back over your lifetime and recall three moments when you felt the most stunned by beauty, silence, or a sense of peace. Where were you? Who were you with? Where do you experience wonder and stand in awe of a simple moment – pondering how a bridge can hold a long line of cars, or contemplating how your fingers move so agilely, or simply the fact of life itself?