Get comfortable with your discomfort

Photo of young child with brown hair and pale skin making a face of discomfort while holding their throat.

This blog post later became a chapter in my book, Scooch: Edging into a Friendly Universe. This is not the final version that made it to print, and I leave it here as it was in March of 2013.

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No Avoiding It
Discomfort is here to stay. Or rather, it's here to pass through periodically, and you must step through it on your journey, sometimes daily. Are you willing?

You'd better be. When we set up our lives to avoid discomfort, there's so much that has to be shut down, so much to be denied, dreaded, warded off. We're also likely to have an irritation response, anger, or a sense of something gone wrong when discomfort shows up. In other words, in failing to embrace discomfort, we increase it. It's not that we need to go looking for it—discomfort gladly comes to us. Nor do we need to make an ascetic religion of never setting things up so that comfort is an option; creating comforts and minimizing discomforts is part of self-care and care of our loved ones. Hyper-preparing, though, to be ready for any eventuality, makes us a slave of avoiding discomfort. The trick is to be willing and able to meet it whenever it passes through.

Got Discomfort?
And pass through, it will: a chill wind, a sheet of wet rain, a season of heavy pollen; the food that sits wrong in your belly (and wait, how much did you eat?); the shameful memory, out of the blue; the mom being horrible to her kids at the store (and you think, I'm never that bad, but the problem is she's just an exaggerated version of your most exaggerated fear about your worst self); the outfit that never came together (but you're no longer home when you notice); the niggling thing that you don't deal with, and it won't shut up; the person whose rolling glance in your direction and away tells you, with utter clarity and no actual rudeness, that you just don't make the grade; that overbearing tendency that just took over again, in that precise moment when some oddly universal lull in conversation took over the room; those sudden false insights that tell you you'll never have the X, Y, or Z to get through this life gracefully; the tiresome, compulsive second-guessing; the thing happening to your kid that you just can't prevent and can't even see how to address; the realization you're outside of the group, even though everyone's being lovely; the financial predicament you're in, again (or worse, still); those 10 pounds you're so tired of gaining and losing again you're thinking of throwing out the juicer and just succumbing to fat, sick, & nearly dead. Got discomfort? A human being can only answer yes.

Welcome Discomfort
So how do you get comfortable with discomfort? Start with expecting it; embrace that it's part of life. When any thought moves through that would suggest it's a problem or something coming in that shouldn't be here, notice the thought. Notice the absurdity, the lie of it. If you're in the right space, it could even make you laugh. Your sock shouldn't be twisting into an imprecise ball inside your boot? That's a good one. Your kid shouldn't be using that tone or that volume or that urgency to express those woes? Another good lie to throw you off and keep you from getting present. ...

Come in Close
Be still with it. Pause when discomfort strikes, instead of moving away from it. Bring it close; expand it. Turn the light back on if you just extinguished it to keep from seeing what's there. Someone recently told me about shutting off the light to keep from seeing her body since she's gained weight. This is as good a metaphor as any and, for plenty, there's nothing metaphorical about it. Maybe the body idea still works for you with something other than weight: for me it's the one more varicose vein that just pushed through to the surface or the next squiggly purple capillary that ruptured there—and Goddess knows I already had a religion of keeping anyone and everyone's eyes off my legs. What if you allowed the light? What if you looked directly toward what you want to look away from? Can you gaze at what you find ugly, right on your own person? Can you find the beauty in it and the beauty in spite of it?

Responding to the Critic
If you tell me I have truly ugly veins in my legs, I'll agree with you. Tell me they're beautiful rivers that flow through my body's terrain murmuring a woman's story of … okay, I'm getting queasy, and I don't believe you. But if you tell me those veins make me ugly, I won't believe you either. I know they don't, though I still need to work with this in some moments. I can sit with them and walk myself through from hideous to human body doing something human bodies do. I can pan away from them, with my legs still in the picture, and see beautiful human being, imperfections included.

Working with the Mind
How else to get comfortable with discomfort? Work with your thoughts. Does fat keep you from creativity or love? Are varicose veins a liability for a single woman who's hit fifty? Only if she's a commodity. Working with my thoughts, I can remind myself that in all my life these legs haven't kept me from love. Why would they suddenly do that now?

This paragraph is brought to you by my love of The Work of Byron Katie. Sometimes I remind clients to just take a blank sheet of paper and write down every thought you have about whatever the current discomfort is. Those who've tried this, when reminded to do it again, say, “Ah, yes, it's so helpful when I do that.” When you've got the list of thoughts before you, you can see that your painful thoughts on the topic at hand are finite. You can take in that they're thoughts—just thoughts—not a narration of reality; not truth. You can notice how universal they are (as Katie says, they're recycled); how any human being sitting with the same discomfort may have a nearly identical list of thoughts. If you don't have time to question those thoughts or turn them around (i.e., look for how the opposite could be just as true, and find concrete examples of that perspective), then at least you've begun to tame the dragon by naming it: Just Thoughts. Thoughts, Byron Katie says, are the source of all the suffering in the world. They're certainly the culprit that brings on any suffering related to discomfort.

Taking Action
Another way to get comfortable with your discomfort is to take action. The action we most often take in response to discomfort is either to move away from it or to make it go away. Either one of these may be just fine as a workable response, but another possibility is to look for the invitation. What's my discomfort inviting me to do? If I'm uncomfortable about clutter, instead of telling myself I don't have time to deal with it, I might take ten minutes to file things away or make two phone calls on the to-do list or consolidate several lists into one, shrinking it as I go by simply dashing off the email I've made a note about. My parents, who have some quaint forms of speech that, like them, originate in Arkansas, often use a number we don't have in the Northlands: the fascinatingly imprecise number toorthree, which itself has precisely two syllables. They use this number all the time. In their world, hardly anything happens in twos or threes, and innumerable things happen in toorthrees. And truly, there's hardly anything calling for you to deal with it that you couldn't give toorthree moments to in order to do toorthree things to move them along—thus clearing your discomfort.

Wait—May I Speak to Procrastination?
Let me address procrastination directly, as it's the ultimate discomfort that thinks it's keeping you from discomfort. And doesn't it only compound it? Procrastination is possibly the best example of Byron Katie's “The hell you're trying to avoid is the hell you're already in.” I counseled someone who avoids her art to stop, welcome, and be still with the discomfort of procrastination when it shows up. Go sit in your work space with no thought of doing art. In that space, fully allow the discomfort of not doing it to take you over. Locate it in your body. Connect to the sensation, and give it your breath (the balm from within). Ask yourself, Is this any harder to face than the discomfort of the blank canvas? Notice that you can stand the discomfort, even if you don't like it. (It's not bigger than you. It won't take you over.) And being willing to meet the discomfort of procrastination, you may find yourself willing to meet the canvas, page, email, phone call, clutter, financial reckoning, yoga session, or that thing you told someone you'd do that you don't.

What's Left?
Sometimes when my clients and I have covered their thinking and their emotions and their action plans, it seems that what's left, if a bit of a furrowed brow remains, is this simple, can't-get-away-from-it truth: just get comfortable with your discomfort. It's okay.

love & blessings, Jaya