Getting Comfortable with Discomfort
One of my favorite teachings from Ram Dass talks about his experience sitting in a nonmoving meditation. At some point pain would arise, a knee would spasm, a foot would fall asleep, a mosquito would land and feast on his flesh, and he wouldn’t react. A cat would bring a mouse, still clinging to life, and devour it in front of him. And still he would simply sit still, not move, and notice. Meditation teaches us to be with what is, meeting reality in that moment. A pain in the knee? Okay, here’s pain. An anxious thought? Hello, anxiety, my old friend. A cat eating a mouse? Just a cat doing cat things and a mouse doing mouse things. Life goes on doing what life does. Meeting the moment is the thing that brings peace, not necessarily striving for a particular result at the end or peace itself. Even the pursuit of peace generates suffering if we are focused on the end versus the process.
To immerse yourself in nature, one must be able to be a bit uncomfortable. Biting bugs and larger predatory animals, hot sticky humidity, and frigid bone-chilling cold, saturating rain, and scathing sunburns: nature will make you uncomfortable and then wrap you back up in the comfort of her beauty.
Yoga and mindfulness teach us to be with the everchanging landscape of temporary sensations, thoughts and emotions that arise. The practice is to remember we are the witness of it all, not the thought, feeling or sensation. If I must have everything in my external world perfect to be comfortable, then I am disempowered. If I am so comfortable with my inner landscape and believe in my ability to respond to any circumstance, I can travel through the depths of the unknown and be comfortable anywhere.
Birthing Joy
Buddhism speaks to the ways in which our suffering is perpetuated by our clinging desire for things to be different than what they are. When we are in deep suffering it’s the worst to hear someone say, “what you resist persists.” Yet our attachment to a wanting or an expectation that things ought to be a different way exacerbates the suffering.
Life has suffering in it. The seed must push up against the heavy dirt to come into the world. Watch a mama birth. It is only through the laboring contractions and the pushing that life bursts forth. It’s the hard conversations and arguments that often bring the breakthrough. The more we resist that natural order of things, striving only for comfort, the more we suffer and erode our potential for resiliency.
When we strive to be comfortable all the time, it is a set up to live in anxiety, unsettled even in the easy moments because we may become so afraid of losing that comfort. When we step forward, even in anxiety, courage generates a fertile presence for joy to take root. Freedom from attachment to a false sense of how things ought to be, allows us to meet people, situations, ourselves in truth.
Sometimes the discomfort is in staying, sometimes it’s in going and trying something new, only you can know those edges and find the possibility of joy on the other side. Ironically joy doesn’t live in the center of our comfort as marketing ploys might have you believe. Rather, I find her jubilant nature at the edge of discomfort. She lives at the threshold of possibility in the moment your foot leaves the deck for a cannon ball into the waters of the unknown. Embracing the sweet mystery of discomfort holds a wealth of joy.
Avoiding Spiritual Escapism
We don’t always need to live within four walls to be safe and comfortable; just look at the trees and the birds. Wide open spaces can be liberating if we reach out into that uncomfortable space of the unknown. We don’t have to domesticate all that is beautiful, wild and free in order to connect with it. The wild is lovely because it is free, and freedom in our soul comes from releasing our attachment to how we think things should be and connecting on a different level. We are programmed to want control and power and to be able to have things our way in our boxes. But a broader freedom and safety lives in the realm of a tolerance for discomfort and relationship with, the mystery and known.
Breathwork, walking, meditation, dance, yoga, movement, and nature ground the spiritual knowing into reality. The practices allow us to put space between what is happening and our reaction to it, so we might be responsive and responsible. It allows us to remember all things change, even and especially the comfort. Many practices of sitting through pain can disguise dissociation rather than learning to be with what is. The sweet spot is a total awareness of the pain and being present through it, letting nothing disturb you.
The goal of meditation is not to dissociate, it’s to be with whatever arises and know it too passes. If we feel into the anger, grief, pain, we get relief. Most emotions will last about 90 seconds, then we can set it down if we don’t entertain our thoughts about it, which generates more feeling and more behavior and more suffering. All things change. All things end—even the good, and especially the bad.
