The Practice: Being Uncomfortable
“The basic principal of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.”
Daily Practice and Reflection:
They say the difference between mindfulness and simple recognition is a level of acceptance of how things are. Sounds easy enough but in reality, when things are challenging or uncomfortable, acceptance might not be our first reaction. So, part of this practice is leaning into to being okay when things aren’t okay, finding a moment of calm when things are turbulent and chaotic. And our meditation practice is providing us an opportunity to develop this skill. Sitting in stillness when we don’t want to, when we are restless, agitated, bored, or uncomfortable, all the moments we choose to stay and be with rather than quit and move on provide us with the capacity (and confidence) to handle the uneasiness of life.
Through the practice of presence, we come to feel and experience the dualities of life. Life is filled with both praise and blame, gain and loss, joy and sorrow, and birth and death. There is no escaping this truth and there is no escaping impermanence. As the Buddha taught, “Whatever has the nature to arise will also pass away.” These two fundamental truths (duality and impermanence) cause humans tremendous suffering. AND this suffering doesn’t have to be the end of the story. We can learn skillful ways of being with our discomfort as we change our relationship to it.
As Haruki Murakami said, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” And this speaks largely to impact our perceptions have on our experience. This past Monday evening I shared the formula: Pain x Resistance = Suffering. I have found this formula quite helpful in my understanding of how much my mind influences my experience. According to the formula, the amount of our suffering is proportional to our level of resistance (i.e., our reactivity, our avoidance, our attachments to the idea of how things should be, our desire to fix, control, or manipulate, our delusion and closed mindedness, or our lack of curiosity… I think you get the idea). So, what happens to the formula when we replace resistance with allowance or acceptance? What do you get? I think you get a little more ease. What happens when you replace resistance with any of the benevolent qualities of heart: kindness, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, humility, or love? Would you be left with freedom? Liberation?
Both alternative choices to resistance mentioned above transforms our pain into the healing practice of mindfulness, the appropriate response. And just to be clear, neither acceptance nor the benevolence qualities of heart have anything to do we indifference. We are not indifferent to our pain but choosing to be with it in a more skillful, helpful, and wholesome way.
We realize that our comfort zone is not the best place for spiritual awakening. Come to think of it, I cannot think of a single transformative experience that didn’t come without some bumps and bruises. So, what if we held the perspective that working with our pain is a precious opportunity to learn and heal? What if we saw difficult moments as an opportunity to make different choices: choices about how we care for ourselves and others? What if discomfort was the means for deepening our love and care? Mark Nepo reminds us, “When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.”
“What brought me peace was my willingness to sit with discomfort and agitation, my belief that I could handle whatever was happening.”
Meditation Practice:
“How else could we identify the patterns within us that are still in need of healing if we weren’t triggered?”
“Somethings just hurt… and we hold this understanding, this knowing and universal truth of life. And in doing so we start to create a different relationship. We are so lost in it, identified with, defined by. We can be with rather than be of. There is a spaciousness. Our awareness is bigger than the problem. Feel the pain of it rather than the disgrace of it.”
“Unpleasant doesn’t mean unproductive.”
“Sitting every day requires sitting even when one does not feel like it, because that is when discomfort arises, and one can begin to become at ease with unease. This is easier said than done, but in the end that is precisely the point.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“Your comfort zone is not the best place for spiritual awakening or the deepening of presence.”
“We cannot experience the totality of liberation until we experience the totality of our experience.”
“When we find meaning in our suffering, it ceases to be suffering.”
“Being okay with not being okay does not make things automatically better… But it does stop you from adding more tension to an already difficult situation… Being okay with not being okay helps you let go.”
“Life isn’t always fair. Things don’t always go according to our plans. There is pain as there is pleasure; people who were once loving and loyal don’t always remain loving and loyal. Everything can change in end ‘as quick as the swish of a horse’s tail’.”
“This trust in myself doesn’t mean that I’m okay all the time, but it does mean that when I am not okay, I can let myself not be okay and I can take care of that not-okayness.”
“Happiness is the state of not being overwhelmed by our suffering but rather learning to be with it.”
“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”
“The obstacle is the path.”
“the path is well-being that includes non-well-being, contentment that includes non-contentment, and comfort that includes discomfort.”