The gift of discomfort
The origin of many of our so-called “problems” lies in our unwillingness to be with discomfort.
The discomfort that may come from painful emotions, lack of control, heartbreak, vulnerability, difficult conversations, anguish…
Cultivating the capacity to experience discomfort without trying to escape, fix, or react from it requires deep courage and commitment.
And yet it isn’t until we’re willing to BE with everything, that we’ll be truly free.
Being alive includes moments of deep discomfort. Try as we may to avoid them, sooner or later we’re all humbled into remembering that.
Many go into self-development hoping it will provide a formula, insight, or technique to avoid feeling pain… only to find true spirituality doesn’t offer us an escape from being human. It actually guides us to open and say yes to the wholeness of life with all it’s colours and textures.
Can we be with the beauty AND the brutality that comes with being alive?
Until then, we will try to manipulate life (and/or ourselves) into a shape that, we hope, will protect us from discomfort.
Until then, we will be so afraid of discomfort, we’ll rather pay any price to avoid feeling it.
Until then, we will never allow ourselves to be authentic or to surrender into the “risk” of being alive, because we don’t trust our ability to meet what arises in the moment.
Our minds often make us believe we can only bear so much and thus we need to protect ourselves from life, from pain. Yet it’s often the strategies that we’ve developed to avoid pain that actually keep us in the discomfort we seek to avoid.
What if when we encounter discomfort, instead of making it “wrong” or labelling it as a problem, we allow ourselves to open with curiosity to it?
What if we choose to see discomfort as an opportunity? As a neutral experience rather than a personal one?
Maybe even as a potential sign of growth (my clients will have heard me talk about "growing pains")?
Nature teaches us everything changes and passes, if we allow it to do so.
Our capacity to taste the sweetness of life is inextricably linked to our willingness to taste the bitterness - for they’re not opposites but partners working hand in hand in this school of life.
The question remains: Do we dare opening to life?