What Brings Us Together: The Curiosity That Transforms
What if the questions that draw us to learning could also reshape who we become? Across disciplines and life paths, curiosity emerges as sacred work, an opening into connection, healing, and transformation.
What if our questions could reshape not just our own lives, but the world around us? That's the inquiry at the heart of a new storytelling project from the California Institute of Integral Studies, in which faculty, students, and alumni were asked a seemingly simple question: "What curiosity brought you to CIIS?"
The answers reveal something profound about what draws people to this unique institution, and what becomes possible when curiosity is treated not as idle wondering, but as sacred work.
Read below at some of the different themes that came up based on peoples reflections.
When Fear Becomes Medicine
Much comes from the courage to look directly at what frightens us most. For some, that meant confronting Islamophobic stereotypes and racist systems. For others, it meant exploring the "places that scare us" as potential sites of healing rather than hatred. Connecting these stories, and these courageous seekers, is a conviction that our deepest anxieties, when approached with gentleness and curiosity, can become transformative.
Finding Academic Homes for the Whole Self
Alumni and faculty describe seeking programs where Buddhism and psychology could coexist, where Chicana spirituality could be studied alongside women's studies, where sexuality could be understood through the integration of mind, body, and spirit. As Associate Professor Charlotte María Sáenz asks, "What is education that creates those fertile environments for liberation?" — at CIIS, that question isn't rhetorical; it's the foundation.
Leaning Into the Ineffable
CIIS is a community comfortable with mystery. Multiple scholars speak of consciousness itself as their primary motivator — not to conquer or explain it away, but to dwell in the wonder of it. They explore what happens in meditation retreats and psychedelic experiences, ask fundamental questions about existence and being, and pursue what lies beyond the materialist framework that dominates contemporary culture.
Alignment, Ancestors, and Ancient Wisdom
For many, the journey to CIIS was deeply personal: a search for alignment between inner truth and outer purpose, a desire to honor ancestral dreams, a quest to understand how physical practices transform psychological reality. Their stories reveal a hunger for education that weaves together ancient wisdom and contemporary research, intuition and academia, tradition and emergence.
Humanity Contemplating Itself, Together
No one at CIIS is alone in their questions. All students and scholars are people seeking community, connection, and collective transformation. Some explore the science of relationship and human potential. Others address the ecological crisis as fundamentally a crisis of worldview, asking how we reconnect with the more-than-human world.
Always Space for More Questions
What emerges from these varied voices is a portrait of an institution where curiosity isn't constrained by disciplinary boundaries, where questions themselves create belonging and wonder becomes a shared practice. Inquiry at CIIS is an invitation. What questions will you bring?
Let Curiosity Lead the Way
What if the questions that draw us to learning could also reshape who we become?
California Institute of Integral Studies
Integral education for therapists, thought leaders, creatives, and activists since 1968.
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