Tiny Buddha

Tag: discomfort

  • Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

    Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

    “Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the tangle of emotional resistance against what is already happening.” ~Tara Brach

    The wooden meditation hall creaked softly as sixty people shifted in their seats, trying to find comfort in the silence. Outside, winter rain tapped against the windows, a gentle metronome marking time. I sat cross-legged on my black cushion, watching sweat trickle down my temple despite the cool air. My legs burned as if I’d been running for hours, though I hadn’t moved in forty-five minutes.

    It was day three of my first six-day silent meditation retreat, and I was learning my first profound lesson about physical pain—not from my meditation teacher, but from my protesting body. Little did I know that this experience would become a crucial foundation for navigating a far greater challenge that lay ahead.

    The pain started as a whisper in my lower back, a gentle suggestion that perhaps I should adjust my posture. Within minutes it grew to a shout, then a scream. While other practitioners appeared serene, their faces soft and bodies still, I was waging an internal war. Every few minutes, I’d shift my weight slightly, trying to find that elusive comfortable position. The cushion that had felt so perfect during the orientation session now seemed as unyielding as concrete.

    The meditation instructions echoed in my mind: “Just sit and observe your breath.” But my body had other plans. Each inhale brought awareness of new discomfort—a sharp knife in my hip, a dull ache in my shoulders, pins and needles racing down my calves. The physical sensations became my entire world, drowning out any hope of focusing on my breath.

    I tried everything. Different cushions borrowed from the prop closet. Various positions—Burmese, half-lotus, kneeling. I even snuck to the back of the hall to lean against the wall, feeling like a meditation failure as I watched the straight backs of more experienced practitioners ahead of me.

    Then, on day four, something shifted. Perhaps it was exhaustion from fighting my experience, or maybe it was the wisdom of surrender, but I finally heard what my teacher had been saying all along: “Don’t try to change what’s arising; just be with it with kindness.”

    For the first time, I stopped trying to fix my discomfort. Instead, I got curious about it. What did the pain actually feel like? Was it constant, or did it pulse? Where exactly did it begin and end? As I explored these questions with genuine interest rather than resistance, something remarkable happened—while the physical sensations remained, my suffering began to decrease.

    “In the midst of pain is the whole teaching,” Pema Chödrön’s words would become my lifeline two years later, when a back injury transformed my relationship with pain from a periodic challenge into a constant companion. I would join the ranks of millions living with chronic pain—a silent epidemic that affects more than one in five adults globally.

    While medicine can sometimes dull the sharp edges of physical suffering, many of us learn that managing chronic pain requires more than just medication. It demands a complete reimagining of our relationship with our bodies and with pain itself.

    The lessons from that meditation hall now played out in vivid detail through every moment of my daily life. Simple tasks became exercises in mindful movement. Getting out of bed required a careful choreography of breath and motion. Picking up a dropped pen became a practice in patience and body awareness. Each movement called for the same careful attention I’d learned to bring to meditation.

    The physical pain was just the beginning. In the darkness of sleepless nights, lying on my floor because no other position brought relief, my mind raced with endless worries: Would I ever recover? Could I continue counseling my clients in person? How would I pay the mounting medical bills? These thoughts circled like hungry wolves, testing the limits of my newfound practice of acceptance.

    Working as a therapist brought its own unique challenges. I vividly remember sitting across from clients, maintaining my therapeutic presence while searing pain radiated from my tailbone through my entire spine. Each session became a practice in dual awareness—being present for my clients while acknowledging my own experience. Some days, the effort to maintain this balance left me depleted, with barely enough energy to drive home.

    There was also the exhausting social dance of chronic pain. The simple question “How are you?” became complicated. Telling people about the constant pain felt burdensome after a while. No one wants to always be the person who’s suffering. So instead, I’d smile and say, “I’m fine,” swallowing the truth along with the discomfort. These small acts of concealment created their own kind of fatigue, a lonely space between the public face and private reality.

    I invite you to pause and reflect on your own relationship with pain. When discomfort arises, what stories does your mind create about it?

    Notice how your body responds—the subtle tightening, the wish to push away what’s difficult. Consider what it might feel like to create just a little space around your pain, like opening a window in a stuffy room.

    Sometimes I think of pain as an unwanted house guest. We didn’t invite it, we don’t want it to stay, but fighting its presence only creates more tension in our home. Instead, we can acknowledge it’s here, set appropriate boundaries, and continue living our lives around it. Some days we might even discover unexpected gifts in its presence—a deeper appreciation for good moments, increased empathy for others’ struggles, or the discovery of our own resilience.

    Working with pain mindfully reveals that healing happens on multiple levels. When we respond to physical discomfort with gentle awareness, we start noticing how our thoughts create narratives about the pain, how emotions arise in waves, and how our nervous system responds to kind attention. Through this practice, we can learn to expand our attention beyond the pain, discovering that even in difficult moments, there is also the warmth of sunlight on our face, the sound of birds outside our window, the taste of morning coffee.

    Years later, my pain isn’t as severe, but it remains a daily companion. I carry a back pillow everywhere as if it’s an accessory, mindfully choosing which events to attend and for how long. Gardening, once a carefree joy, has become an exercise in presence—each movement an opportunity to listen to my body’s wisdom. Some days still find me lying on the floor, being with whatever my body is expressing in that moment.

    But there’s a profound difference now. Where I once pushed through pain with gritted teeth, I’ve learned to respond to my body’s signals with care and compassion.

    This shift feels especially valuable as I age, knowing that new physical challenges will likely arise. Each twinge and ache is no longer an enemy to vanquish but a reminder to pay attention, to move more slowly, to tend to myself with kindness.

    The clock in that meditation hall taught me about impermanence—how even the most challenging moments eventually pass. My back injury taught me about acceptance and resilience. Together, these experiences showed me that while we can’t always choose what happens to our bodies, we can choose how we meet these experiences with awareness and compassion. In doing so, we discover that peace isn’t found in the absence of pain but in our capacity to be with it skillfully.

  • How to Develop True Self-Confidence Amid Life’s Uncertainty

    How to Develop True Self-Confidence Amid Life’s Uncertainty

    “Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” ~Peter T. McIntyre

    I used to think of confidence as something external, something that people exuded in their body language, in the way they spoke, or in the certainty of their decisions.

    To me, a confident person had a poker face and a strong, grounded posture. I thought confidence was something you cultivated through endless practice—training yourself to speak with assertiveness and decisiveness, to project certainty even when you didn’t feel it inside.

    But I’ve come to understand that true self-confidence is something that comes from within, and I fully embrace Stephen Batchelor’s definition: “Self-confidence is trust in our capacity to awaken. It is both the courage to face whatever life throws at us without losing our sense of calm and the humility to treat every situation we encounter as one from which we can learn.”

    It is not arrogance or blind faith in one’s abilities; it is a quiet trust in our inner wisdom, an unwavering belief that we can navigate whatever life presents, even when the path ahead is unclear.

    I did not arrive at this understanding easily. It took one of the most difficult periods of my life to uncover the strength that had always been within me, hidden beneath layers of conditioning, fear, and uncertainty.

    In the midst of heartbreak, loss, and what felt like complete falling apart, I learned to sit with my emotions, to hold space for them, and to trust that they were not my enemy but my guide.

    When Everything Falls Apart

    There was a time when everything I thought was certain suddenly crumbled. The foundation I had built my life upon—the plans, the expectations, the identity I had crafted—was gone. I found myself with nothing solid to hold onto except my own ability to endure. And even that felt fragile at times.

    During those days, self-confidence was not something I actively sought. In truth, I was just trying to get through each moment. I took things hour by hour, day by day. I sought support in those around me, who held space for me with compassion. I turned inward, searching for any glimmer of light in the darkness. Sometimes I found it. Other times, it felt like I was shoveling more soil over it, burying it deeper.

    It wasn’t a linear process. Healing never is. Some days, I felt strong and capable; others, I was overwhelmed by grief, sadness, and doubt. But slowly, without realizing it at first, I was building something. I was learning to trust myself. I was learning that even in the most painful moments, I could survive them. And not just survive; I could learn from them, grow through them, and emerge stronger on the other side.

    Sitting with Discomfort: The Pathway to Confidence

    I had been meditating, reading, and reflecting for years, but during this time, my practice took on a different meaning. It was no longer about finding peace, clarity, or becoming a better person; it was about learning to sit with discomfort without trying to fix it. There were times (most!) when my meditation felt anything but calming. Instead of feeling still or at ease, I felt restless, agitated, even more lost.

    But what I didn’t realize then was that I was doing the work. Meditation wasn’t about achieving a state of bliss—it was about cultivating the capacity to be with whatever arose, without running from it or pushing it away. The more I practiced this, the more I realized that the self-confidence I sought wasn’t about having all the answers. It was about trusting that I could handle the unknown.

    I came to understand that uncertainty is the only certainty in life. As Susan Jeffers wrote in Embracing Uncertainty, “The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it.” What I needed was not certainty about the future, but trust in my ability to meet it with openness and resilience.

    The Confidence That Emerges After Pain

    With time, I realized that confidence isn’t about knowing exactly what will happen next. It’s about knowing that whatever happens, we have the strength and inner resources to face it. And more than that—we have the ability to thrive through it.

    For me, true self-confidence came from understanding impermanence, from recognizing that everything changes, and from knowing that I, too, have the ability to adapt and respond. It came from experiencing suffering and emerging on the other side with greater compassion—for myself and for others. It came from realizing that I didn’t need to have everything figured out to trust myself completely.

    This kind of confidence isn’t loud or showy. It doesn’t seek validation or prove itself to others. It is quiet, deep, and unshakable. It is the trust that we have our own backs, that we can meet life with open arms, and that even in uncertainty, we are always enough.

    Your Inner Light Is Always There

    If you are in the midst of struggle right now, feeling like the ground beneath you is shifting, I want you to know this: There is a powerful light within you. It may feel dim at times (maybe most of the time!), but it is there. It carries the wisdom, strength, and love you need—not only to survive but to live fully, with depth and meaning.

    Concepts like confidence or inner strength may sound foreign now, yet they form, accumulate, and grow in the quiet, unseen ways you keep going, in the small moments you show up for yourself, in the hidden effort you make every day, in the part of you that still hopes.

    True self-confidence is not about never feeling fear or doubt. If anything, these emotions are an essential part of being human. It is only because of fear and doubt that we can truly recognize freedom and inner strength—for what is darkness but the absence of light? By sitting with these emotions, allowing them, and creating space for them as best as you can, you begin to embrace your humanity.

    Self-confidence is about walking forward, holding space for it all, and trusting that your human nature has what it takes to navigate whatever comes, even if you’ve struggled with this in the past. It is about knowing, deep in your bones, that no matter what life brings, there is a light within you that is always lit—you simply need to allow it to shine through.

    And that is how your quiet, inner confidence carries you forward. Every experience is a gift—an opportunity to expand your wisdom, to grow in ways you may not always notice, but that always carry you forward.

  • If You’re Afraid of Making a Big Life Change

    If You’re Afraid of Making a Big Life Change

    “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~Alan Watts

    I used to think that stability was the key to happiness. Stay in one place, build a career, nurture long-term relationships—these were the pillars of a successful life, or so I believed.

    My life was a carefully constructed fortress of routine and familiarity. Wake up at 6 a.m., commute to the same office I’d worked at for a decade, come home to the same apartment I’d lived in since college, rinse and repeat. It was safe. It was predictable. It was slowly suffocating me.

    As I approached my fortieth birthday, I found myself increasingly restless. The walls of my comfortable life felt more like a prison than a sanctuary. I’d scroll through social media, seeing friends and acquaintances embarking on new adventures, changing careers, and moving to new cities, and I’d feel a pang of envy mixed with fear.

    “I wish I could do that,” I’d think, quickly followed by, “But what if it all goes wrong?”

    It was during one of these late-night scrolling sessions that I came across a quote from Alan Watts that would change everything: “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

    I stared at those words, feeling as if they were speaking directly to my soul. What if, instead of fearing change, I embraced it?

    The next morning, I woke up with a sense of purpose I hadn’t felt in years. I decided to make a change—not a small one, but a seismic shift that would challenge everything I thought I knew about myself and my life. I was going to quit my job, sell most of my possessions, and travel the world for a year.

    The moment I made this decision, I felt a mix of exhilaration and sheer terror. What about my career? My apartment? My relationships? The questions swirled in my mind, threatening to overwhelm me. But beneath the fear, there was a spark of excitement that I couldn’t ignore.

    I gave myself six months to prepare. Those months were a whirlwind of planning, saving, and facing the reactions of friends and family. Some were supportive; others thought I was having a midlife crisis.

    My parents were particularly worried. “But what about your future?” they asked, echoing the same concerns they’d had when I switched majors in college.

    As the departure date drew closer, my anxiety grew. There were moments when I seriously considered calling the whole thing off. What if I was making a horrible mistake? What if I couldn’t handle the uncertainty?

    It was during one of these moments of doubt that I realized something important: The fear I was feeling wasn’t just about this trip. It was the same fear that had kept me trapped in a life that no longer fulfilled me. If I gave in to it now, I might never break free.

    So, I pushed forward. I boarded that plane with a backpack, a one-way ticket, and a heart full of both terror and hope. The first few weeks were challenging. I felt lost, not just geographically but existentially. Who was I without my job title, my routine, my familiar surroundings?

    But slowly, something magical began to happen. As I navigated new cities, tried new foods, and met people from all walks of life, I felt layers of my old self peeling away. I discovered a resilience I never knew I had. Problems that would have sent me into a tailspin back home became adventures and challenges to solve. I learned to trust my instincts, to find joy in the unexpected, and to embrace the unknown.

    One particularly transformative moment came three months into my journey. I was hiking in the mountains of Peru, struggling with altitude sickness and questioning my decision to attempt this trek.

    As I sat on a rock, catching my breath and fighting back tears, an elderly local woman passed by. She smiled at me and said something in Quechua that I didn’t understand. But her smile and the gentle pat she gave my shoulder spoke volumes.

    In that moment, I realized that kindness and human connection transcend language and culture. I also realized that I was stronger than I ever gave myself credit for.

    As the months passed, I found myself changing in ways I never expected. I became more open, more curious, more willing to try new things. I learned to live with less and appreciate more. The constant movement and change became not just tolerable but exhilarating. I was, as Alan Watts had said, joining the dance of change.

    But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. There were days of loneliness, moments of doubt, and times when I missed the comfort of my old life. I learned that embracing change doesn’t mean you never feel fear or uncertainty. It means you feel those things and move forward anyway.

    As my year of travel neared its end, I faced a new challenge: what next? The thought of returning to my old life felt impossible. I was no longer the person who had left a year ago. But the idea of continuing to travel indefinitely didn’t feel right either. I realized I was craving a new kind of stability—one built on the foundation of flexibility and growth I’d cultivated during my travels.

    I decided to move to a new city, one I’d fallen in love with during my travels. I found a job that allowed me to use my old skills in new ways, with the flexibility to continue exploring the world. I made new friends who shared my love of adventure and personal growth. I created a life that embraced change rather than feared it.

    Looking back on this journey, I’m amazed at how far I’ve come. The person who was once paralyzed by the idea of change now seeks it out as a source of growth and excitement. Here are some of the most important lessons I’ve learned.

    1. Fear is not a stop sign.

    Fear is a natural part of change, but it doesn’t have to control you. Acknowledge it, understand it, but don’t let it make your decisions for you.

    2. Discomfort is where growth happen.

    The moments that challenged me the most were also the ones that taught me the most about myself and the world.

    3. Flexibility is strength.

    Being able to adapt to new situations is far more valuable than trying to control everything around you because often, the only thing you can control is how well you adapt.

    4. Less is often more.

    Living out of a backpack for a year taught me how little I actually need to be happy.

    5. Change is constant.

    Instead of resisting change, learning to flow with it brings a sense of peace and excitement to life.

    6. It’s never too late.

    At forty, I thought I was too old to radically change my life. I was wrong. It’s never too late to start a new chapter.

    If you find yourself feeling stuck, yearning for something more but afraid to make a change, I encourage you to take that first step.

    It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as selling everything and traveling the world (though I highly recommend it if you can!). Start small. Take a different route to work. Try a new hobby. Have a conversation with someone you wouldn’t normally talk to. Each small change builds your resilience and opens you up to new possibilities.

    Embracing change doesn’t mean your life will always be easy or that you’ll never face challenges. But it does mean that you’ll be living fully, growing constantly, and experiencing the rich tapestry of what life has to offer.

    Your life is not a fixed path but a journey of constant evolution. Embrace the changes, learn from the challenges, and celebrate the growth. The world is vast, life is short, and the greatest adventures often begin with a single step into the unknown. So take that step. Join the dance of change. You might be amazed at where it leads you.

  • Getting Unstuck After an Unexpected Life Change

    Getting Unstuck After an Unexpected Life Change

    “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” ~Lewis Carroll

    After an unfortunate layoff earlier this year, I found myself feeling stuck, spiritually, physically, and mentally. I had moved from Virginia to Los Angeles for my MBA, and I was working remotely as a product manager for a climate fintech company, which combined a lot of things I enjoyed.

    In the two years I had spent out west, I built a great group of climbing buddies, felt a sense of community, and was involved with local non-profits. Los Angeles wasn’t a perfect match for me, but I had made myself at home, and I was feeling settled.

    When the layoff happened, it was jarring. I felt I was an asset to the company, and I had built solid relationships and finished important work in my tenure there. But I wanted to maintain the go-with-the-flow attitude I aspire to, so I told myself everything was fine.

    After my computer dramatically shut itself off, I pulled out some Post-it notes. Then I added to my wall some goals that I wanted to accomplish in my personal and professional life, with my newfound lack of purpose. I knew a big shift was happening and it felt non-consensual.

    I had been content in my role. And previously, my life changes had been easy to predict. Graduate > get a job > apply to grad school > move near the grad school > get a job > aim for promotion. I had yet to experience a life change where I didn’t know what was next by the time the last chapter ended. I felt like I was in a sort of purgatory, waiting for something to happen to me.

    I started applying to jobs right away to numb that feeling and the discomfort it brought. Initially, I was searching for an exciting opportunity to magically appear and fill my time. 

    I didn’t expect much to change in my life, just the team and the name of the company I worked for. I expected to get hired and go back to what I was doing before—working on something I cared about, living in Los Angeles, and continuing my nice little life I had started to feel comfortable in.

    But I struggled. The market wasn’t great, and I found myself putting in great effort on applications only to be rejected automatically. Or I’d get interviewed, but they’d decide to hire internally instead. Nothing seemed to work out, and I couldn’t figure out why. I was networking, customizing my resume and cover letters, and getting referrals—everything I was supposed to be doing after a layoff. It was demoralizing.

    Eventually, I realized I was struggling because I was resisting the change. I was looking for the same situation I’d had—remote work as a product manager in climate tech. I was trying to resurrect the life I had been living before. But that version of reality was over, and there was no going back. 

    Even if I got a new role in the same industry and function, life would be different; it was a new chapter. And maybe seeking out something that already left my life wasn’t a great idea but was actually a way of clinging to the past.

    So I set out to intentionally figure out what was next. I decided to give myself some space to do that, and I spent time road tripping, climbing, and sleeping outside or in my car, living very simply and introspecting. I looked back at how I’d ended up in the situation I was in. I had always been good at fulfilling the expectations of others and doing what I was “supposed” to do.

    External forces had driven my life. I had always been pushed toward something or pulled by something. I got a job offer, so I took the job; I got admitted, so I matriculated.

    I had never given myself permission to turn down a “safe” opportunity that came my way. I had never taken a next step in life from a point of stillness, only as a result of some irresistible magnetic external force.

    It was time to exist in the stillness and choose which path to go down rather than wait for something to pull me. As a people-pleaser, it felt daunting to sit in the stillness and create my own vision for my future, not driven by an external magnetic force. But I was already unemployed, aka not doing what I was “supposed” to be doing, so I figured I might as well lean into the discomfort and really focus on what I wanted.

    I had to get in touch with my own gut, something I had long silenced. So I evaluated the parts of my life that I liked and the parts that I wanted to adjust. It looked a lot like my annual goal setting, which was full of goals that I wasn’t going to reach this calendar year anymore, including “get promoted to senior product manager,” among other things.

    I evaluated my satisfaction with my life, broken out by category. I looked at how I spent my time within each category and how I felt during that time. These are the categories I used:

    1. Career & Financial

    2. Relationships

    3. Wellness

    4. Fun & Hobbies

    5. Lifestyle

    I was left with a clearer picture of what I valued versus what was in my life due to external forces. I loved climbing; I didn’t love living downtown. I loved working on climate issues; I didn’t love driving in traffic. I started creating a vision for my life with these values in mind and I began to feel more at ease.

    “The direction of your focus is the direction your life will move.” ~Ralph Marston

    One big takeaway I got from the exercise is that I was leaving the city to go climbing (and therefore sleeping in my car) more nights than I was spending in my downtown LA apartment. Plus, I had insomnia when I was staying in LA. When I lived out of my car, I felt at ease. Everything felt simpler and made more sense. I didn’t feel frenetic or stressed, yet only my surroundings had changed.

    That’s how I realized that my downtown apartment had come to represent clinging to the past. I didn’t even like spending time in it—my insomnia was cured whenever I left. It was time to leave that apartment for good. LA wasn’t the problem, but what the apartment itself had come to represent was pointing to the problem—I had been playing it safe trying to please others and ignoring my own gut. It was time to rearrange my life to stay focused on the things that energized me.

    I wanted to live out of my car and just climb for a little while. But that felt like jumping off a cliff. I researched options and talked to friends living the so-called “climbing dirtbag” lifestyle.

    I gave myself permission to embrace the instability and the uncertainty. I canceled my apartment without another living space lined up and moved my things into storage. I knew I would have challenges and inconveniences in my life either way. At least this way I felt in alignment with my gut.

    The move created real momentum in my life. I was no longer waiting to be pulled by the external happenings in my life. I was intentionally creating movement in the direction of something I wanted.

    I was moving even though it was scary, and even though the change may have been small in the eyes of others, I didn’t know how the gaps would be filled in or what would be next.

    The change was an emotional rollercoaster. The planning phase was incredibly stressful, amplified by the questions others asked me, which I did not have answers for. But once I started acting on my move, I felt more relaxed, then elated and grief-stricken all at the same time.

    I was relaxed because I fell into a flow of checking off to-do items. I was elated because opportunities were opening for me. I began to see a vision for a future that was positive and that also looked very different than the past. I was grieving the loss of the job I’d enjoyed and the life I’d had.

    I realized a lot of feelings I had silenced right after the layoff were surfacing during this move. In my effort to “go with the flow,” I hadn’t let myself fully experience the present moment and the discomfort it brought. I resisted rather than surrendering.

    I learned that I have to actually experience the discomfort that is there in my life. I can’t avoid it, or it will keep resurfacing again and again, pushing me to make a change. And if I experience it, it will pass.

    For me, there was so much tied up in the apartment and what it had come to represent. The change was hard, but I felt more authentic. I was in the driver’s seat, and I was starting to feel more comfortable making decisions about the direction I wanted to take.

    Just taking some small decisive action in alignment with my own vision for my future made it possible for me to see good things that might come next—possibilities that felt exciting. It’s a lot easier to exist day to day from a place of playfulness when the uncertain future feels bright.

    If you’re at a crossroads after an unexpected change, like I was, take a pause before jumping into a life that looks a lot like the one you had before. Maybe this is a perfect opportunity to reevaluate your life and consider what would really make you happy. Surrender to the changes, and the flow of life might surprise you.

  • How Pain Can Be a Teacher and Why We Need to Stop Avoiding It

    How Pain Can Be a Teacher and Why We Need to Stop Avoiding It

    “The strongest hearts have the most scars.” ~Unknown

    I always hated pain when growing up. For as long as I can remember I tried to avoid it. Physical pain was uncomfortable, but emotional pain was the real torture. It was sometimes easier to have a fight and stop communicating than to have a challenging conversation.

    Disconnecting emotionally and withdrawing from painful experiences was my de facto subconscious strategy. I still pursued goals and succeeded, but this didn’t feel painful to me because I used my passion and bravado to drive through the long hours and grueling work.

    If I wasn’t avoiding pain, I was in denial. It cost me. Ignoring a painful feeling made me numb all over. Denying an unpleasant emotion made me oblivious to the whole spectrum of sensations.

    Avoiding dentists created more issues and massive bills down the road. Dodging challenging scenarios and boredom cost me passions and hobbies that could have led to a different career or a creative outlet.

    This continued until one day I found myself without busy work and distractions when taking a career break. Not being able to hide behind time fillers, a whole army of emotions and feelings came at once. The bottled-up monster escaped, the dam broke, and the castle fell under attack.

    It was overwhelming and frightening. Remembering from my coaching training that sensory adaptation will kick in at some point, I let it all play out. I meditated for hours observing the emotions rising and falling like an ocean tide. Eventually, the monster deflated and the flood dried out.

    Recognizing that there is an issue is the first step to resolving it. I realized that this was not the way I wanted to continue living. After learning more about mind machinery, I became aware of my behavioral patterns. Enneagram type 7, called Enthusiast or Epicurian, perfectly described how I ran “Me”—motivated by a desire to be happy and avoid discomfort.

    Before that, I accepted my pain avoidance patterns as an unchangeable status quo. I did not see reality in any different way. With time, I learned that pain was not the bogeyman to be afraid of.

    Pain became my teacher, an early alarm that something was not going well, and a motivator. Getting praise and encouragement for good behavior isn’t the only way to learn. Our participation prizes-driven society creates a false sense of entitlement, preventing us from personal growth.

    Teacher pain can fix unproductive behavior or an issue almost instantaneously. As cruel as they can be, these lessons are long remembered and followed sometimes our whole lives. A perfect example of this is how Tony Robbins made his early mark as a quit smoking coach by making clients associate nausea and fear of his booming voice with cigarettes.

    To be clear, I’m not suggesting we should knowingly hurt ourselves or others as a teaching tool; just that we need to stop avoiding pain and discomfort because they can both lead to growth.

    When I became appreciative and respectful of pain, I was able to slow down and learn more about what it taught me.

    Our bodies communicate through sensations. Pain is one of the common languages that the body uses to make us understand in a split second that something isn’t right. It also can speak for both your body and mind, as our emotional and physical circuitry is interconnected. Taking Panadol can ease the pain of social rejection in the same way it can fix your headache.

    It is the language that bonds us with other humans. Shared painful experiences do not need to be explained. They are understood on a deeper level. Compassion is born from the language of pain, as it makes us appreciate what another person is going through.

    What would our lives be like if we never experienced pain? Without an early alarm system, a broken bone would not hurt, eventually causing a deadly infection. A serious illness would go unnoticed until a person perished. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a very rare condition affecting 1 out of 25,000 newborns. It is also very dangerous, and most affected people do not survive their childhood.

    When we strip away pain from its emotionally excruciating quality, it is essentially a sensation. Experienced meditators can attest that knee and back pain during long seated meditation sessions eventually lead to the emotional context fading away, showing pain for what it really is.

    It took time to learn the language of pain. Running out of breath, having sore muscles, or feeling anxiety before a performance is good pain. Sharp pain in joints or feeling of discomfort, leading to a crippling flight-or-fight response, is a different animal.

    Good pain keeps us wanting more of the experience. It motivates incremental growth by forming a habit of seeking that familiar feeling. Its bad cousin will cripple us if left unnoticed or overwhelm us, teaching hopelessness.

    The school of pain can’t be skipped. We can’t call in sick or cheat our way out of it. The teacher pain will keep calling our names until we show up for the lesson. Avoiding it would eventually cost more. It is feeding a bottled-up monster that one day turns into a formidable Godzilla.

    It’s pointless to hide from it. Just like Buddha found out about death, sickness, and old age despite his parents’ best efforts to shield him, we will all have to accept that it is ever-present in our lives.

    Walking a life journey made me realize that sometimes there is no other option but to face pain. As uncomfortable and frightening as it may be, if I don’t square up to the monster, it will never go away.

    The saying “the only way out is through” holds true. The next level of personal growth has to happen through discomfort. Though these victories may be invisible to everyone else, they are uniquely valuable to us.

    It may sound like I’ve mastered the art of facing the uncomfortable and I am no longer concerned about pain. That is not true. The lessons I get from pain are still challenging.

    As much as I don’t want to sit through hard lessons, I’ve learned to respect and heed pain’s presence. Knowing that becoming invincible to it is impossible, I’ve learned to recognize the challenge and see it as a catalyst for growth.

    Anticipating pain keeps me motivated to avoid its visits and learn on my own. I will probably never tolerate pain as some people do. I am probably wired that way. But nature can always be complemented by nurture. Resilience, acceptance, and embracing the suck make it valuable learning.

    In her influential book The Upside of Stress, psychologist Kelly McGonigal challenged conventional thinking that stress kills. The research shows that how we perceive stress can turn a negative into positive. Pain can be seen in the same way.

    We can’t pick and choose which parts of human experience we want to face. As tempting as it is to only eat the cherry on top of life’s cake, this will never make us appreciate life wholly. We need to accept all of it. Without pain, we do not know pleasure. Without the discomfort of ignorance, there is no bliss of knowledge.

  • How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small

    How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small

    “The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness, not to stop your progress.” ~Steve Maraboli

    I used to hate my fear because it scared me. It terrified me that when fear arose, it often felt like it was driving me at full speed toward the edge of a cliff.

    And if I were driven off a cliff, I would lose all control, all function, perhaps I would collapse, perhaps I would shatter into a million pieces. I was never totally clear on the details of what would happen if I let the fear get out of control. That’s because I spent most of my life trying to control it.

    It’s why, when things don’t go according to plan, when I am running late or things change at the last minute, I can get snappy and sound angry. I feel rage when people come along and do things that seem to amplify my fear—like my husband using the bathroom three minutes before the train is leaving, or not locking the front door at night with all its three locks.

    Oh, I had so much judgment around this fear. I hated it, but I hated even more that I seemed to be an overly fearful person. I felt disgusted and full of shame for not wanting to do things that other people seemed to find easy, like flying, or for freaking out when I was sick, thinking I was dying.

    I carried the shame of fear around with me, hoping I didn’t have to reveal it, and if I did, if I had to show people how terrified life made me, I would be horribly self-deprecating.

    Because I had this sense that I shouldn’t be like this. It wasn’t normal. So I blamed it on myself as a character default.

    That’s why I wouldn’t want to walk toward scary things. That’s why I avoided things that brought up the fear because if I didn’t, it would have driven me off the cliff so freaking quickly, and I’d think, how stupid could I have been to allow it?

    I see now that my fear lived at such a low-level frequency in my body that I didn’t notice it was there. It was on a low buzz all the time, like a refrigerator noise—not really in my awareness but controlling how I made decisions.

    I know this because, when I was really paying attention, I realized I was always trying to pick the least scary option. But when I kept choosing the least scary option, the least challenging to me, my life got smaller and smaller.

    I was not even really aware that I was doing this. It just felt like I was being sensible.

    But sometimes I would get this glimmer of another world where I did the most interesting and exciting things, like exploring alone somewhere new or taking a belly dancing class. Where I lived unleashed and unbounded by fear. I said what I meant, I did what I wanted, and I didn’t worry all the time about terrible things happening to my loved ones.

    Living a life immersed in fear felt like being bound with invisible rope that no one could see. And because people couldn’t see this rope, they would ask me to do things that I couldn’t possibly say yes to.

    Things started to change when I didn’t just ask how I could get the fear to stop, but I started to learn why there was so much fear in my body, where it came from, and how it was affecting how I experience life. So much of my fear came from a lack of emotional safety, and sometimes physical safety, as a child and young woman.

    When I learned to start being curious about the fear that confined me and not judge it as a character defect, I started unraveling it. This, along with some powerful emotional processing and nervous system regulation, transformed how I now experienced fear in my life.

    Here’s the thing: We don’t intentionally create bodies that can’t handle emotions like fear. We don’t intentionally create nervous systems that are jumpy and hyper-vigilant. We don’t create sensations of immense doom for pleasure.

    How we were taught to be with emotions, how we were taught to allow or not allow them, how we were cared for when we were in the midst of emotions—this all informs how we now deal with fear.

    It makes sense that fear feels too much for our bodies to handle when we have lived with too much fear; when we haven’t had enough emotional support of someone helping us hold that fear; when we’ve had experiences that have terrified us down to our very bones, that have stayed trapped in our bodies; when our lives have been rocked by tragedy; when sudden life-changing events shake any sense of stability from us; when fear has just been too much for too long.

    We need to learn how to provide deep emotional support, a sense of safety, love, empathy, and validation, to our bodies that have held so much pain and discomfort. We need to learn how to tend to and meet our needs.

    Emotions need to be seen, felt, and heard. When we haven’t learned how to do that, how to hold emotions and really be with them, we get pushed into a part of our brains where things feel deeply overwhelming and urgent—our survival reactions.

    It’s a part of our brain that uses primal methods for dealing with emotion—meant to be utilized in emergencies and when our survival is under threat, but too commonly used to discharge uncomfortable emotions. And none of these survival reactions feel good.

    When we are in our survival reactivity, we can feel doomed and trapped; we can feel like there are no options; we can feel the red mists of rage or a deep-freezing panic. We can go into overdrive doing too much, or sometimes we just slow down and shut off. Everything feels like too much.

    That’s why we feel we could go over the edge. That’s why we don’t feel safe. That’s why we desperately try to stay in control. Because we have this sense of an unknown, dark, and terrifying force in our bodies that feels like something beyond what we can handle.

    We don’t know how to deal with this part of our brain, these survival reactions, so we spend our lives attempting to control our fear, hoping that it won’t rear up and push us over the cliff edge.

    But there is another way. And it’s not by feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I couldn’t dislike that piece of advice more because of how wildly misunderstood it is. You can only feel the fear and do it anyway if you have a comfortable relationship with fear and it doesn’t push your nervous system into overwhelm and survival reactivity—where you feel like you are actually fearing for your life.

    If you are in survival mode, you don’t want to be pushing through anything.

    In fact, quite the opposite.

    You want to be doing everything to reassure yourself that you are physically safe, that there is no emergency, that all is well.

    And that is step number one. That’s the first place I go to when I feel the escalating sensations of fear.

    It’s learning to look after yourself and meet your needs in ways that maybe you have never done before. You learn to build your own safety, and to repair all the damage that has been done to that solid feeling of protection that others seem to have but you sense you deeply lack.

    There are several things you can do for this..

    1. Stop the overwhelm.

    My first suggestion is an exercise you can do when you feel you have entered that survival mode of things feeling like way too much—when you are overwhelmed, feeling doomed or trapped. This is an exercise called regulating breath. The aim is to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is where you are “resting and digesting.”

    It’s super simple—short, quick inhale, long exhale. Then repeat this until you are moving away from that deep overwhelm. It’s a signal to the brain that you aren’t unsafe; this isn’t an emergency; you are safe to move out of survival mode and back into your body. I use this breath daily to keep my nervous system regulated and feel a sense of physical safety.

    2. Be curious about why the fear is here.

    The fear didn’t just show up unannounced today. If the fear feels like too much, there is definitely a history that you can trace back. And when you know your history, it can help you drop a lot of the judgment that you feel about it.

    Ask your fear: Where have you been showing up in my life, and how far does this go back?

    3. Ask your fear what it needs.

    Uncomfortable emotions like fear are expressions of needs that have been unmet perhaps for all of your life. Needs like clarity, structure, peace, or consistency. When you can learn to really connect with your emotions and hear what they have to tell you, you can then start meeting those needs.

    I love to talk to my fear. I ask it questions on a regular basis. I ask my fear: What do you need? Why are you here? What are you trying to tell me?

    When I am able to really sit with the fear and hold it in my body, it will tell me things like: I’m just trying to keep you safe. I just want you to be protected. I don’t want you to do unsafe things!

    When I know that the fear just wants to keep me safe, I can then reassure it, and myself, that I can provide the safety that I need. That I know how to make good choices; I know, as an adult, how to look after myself.

    4. Offer empathy and validation.

    Give yourself the deeply nourishing support of validation and empathy. Fear is a normal emotion that manifests as physical reactions in the body because of how we’ve learned to be with emotion, or due to the limited support we have received around big, challenging experiences.

    When you recognize this, you can start to not judge your reactions. You can say to yourself: It makes sense that you feel like this. It’s okay, I’ll stay with you. I will support you through this. 

    You can give yourself the tender validation and empathy you would offer to someone you deeply love—your child, a friend, your partner. You can treat yourself as someone deserving of being wrapped in beautiful, loving empathy.

    When you do things like double-check the locks at night or keep checking your phone to see if your teenager has messaged, when you are asked to take a trip to a place you haven’t been to before, instead of getting lost in the fear or loading yourself down with shame about it, offer empathy and validation instead.

    “You know what? This is bringing up a lot of fear. And it’s understandable that I have fear around this; it’s completely okay. So I am going to support myself through this feeling. I am going to tend to my needs around this feeling. And I am only going to do what feels best for me. What feels right for my body right now.”

    By meeting the needs your emotions are expressing we start to change our relationship with the emotions we find most uncomfortable. When we try to white-knuckle through, we often end up more rattled, more exhausted, more overwhelmed, and sometimes with more trauma than if we had actually taken tender, gentle care of ourselves.

    And by taking loving care of ourselves, by showing up and giving our feelings—and our sense of overwhelm—attention, we can end up naturally starting to want to do those things that maybe we were too scared to do before.

    By giving ourselves the empathy that our emotions so yearn for, we create a much deeper, more loving and trusting connection with ourselves. When we know how to emotionally support ourselves then we can learn how to emotionally support other people.

    My relationship with fear is a work in progress. Sometimes it slips out of my grasp and escalates before I have the chance to process it. But I know now that I can always bring myself back from that edge. I can always bring my nervous system back into regulation, even when it feels a bit messy.

    When we know that we can handle any emotion that comes our way, we have so much more freedom in our lives to make the choices we want to make instead of just choosing the least scary thing.

    Fear is a normal part of life. It’s there to help us stay safe and protected and make good choices. But sometimes, when we have had experiences that have intensified our fear, we can end up keeping ourselves small. Changing how we take care of ourselves to support ourselves in these big emotions is a great first step to living a more exciting, fulfilling life. I hope these tips have been helpful.

  • Why It’s Worth the Temporary Discomfort of Sitting with Intense Emotions

    Why It’s Worth the Temporary Discomfort of Sitting with Intense Emotions

    “Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass.”  ~Lori Deschene

    Can you feel an intense emotion, like anger, without acting on it, reacting to it, or trying to get rid of it?

    Can you feel such an intense emotion without needing to justify or explain it—or needing to find someone or something to blame it on?

    After successfully dodging it for two years, I recently caught Covid-19. The physical symptoms were utter misery. But something much more interesting happened while I was unwell.

    The whole experience brought some intense emotions to the surface. Namely, seething anger about something that had nothing to do with the virus.

    In the handful of days that my symptoms were at their worst, I was absolutely livid. And while on some level it made sense that I was angry that getting this sick was both extremely unpleasant and delaying work on a project I was all fired up about, the anger was manifesting with a deeper-rooted blame.

    I grew up in a religious denomination that had a profound effect on my childhood and adolescence. It taught me through debilitating fear, division, and confusion. It ingrained black-and-white rights and wrongs for living, thinking, and being that had never made sufficient sense to me, no one could adequately explain, and were damaging for me on a number of levels.

    In the past couple of years, I worked through its various effects with shadow work, inner child healing, forgiveness, and even quantum energetic healing. Each of these modalities supported me immensely with healing different layers.

    But the emotion of deep anger I harbored clearly hadn’t gone away, and it simply needed to be felt.

    The more we learn to observe and witness our emotions, the more acutely aware we become of where they’re stemming from, and the more we’re able to notice and catch ourselves when we’re associating our emotions with narratives and situations that are not in fact to blame for how we’re feeling.

    Although I’d initially managed to fashion some connection between being unwell and the church I still harbored so much anger toward, I became increasingly aware that there was none. My inclination to blame the church was part of an ongoing pattern. And it was time to break this pattern.

    At the same time, I’d recently become very aware that whenever I’d hear mention of the church or any of its associated beliefs, a brief surge of anger would leap up in me. I was still feeling triggered.

    I was very ready to move beyond these patterns of blame and anger. And getting to that inner peace I so wanted to feel meant addressing this on an emotional level. I realized that what I needed was to actually sit with these feelings so they could be fully acknowledged and allowed to move through me.

    The only person who is ever responsible for your emotions is you. And your emotions are simply powerful feedback. They show up for one of two dominant reasons.

    Either they’re unresolved past emotions that are surfacing because they’re ready to be acknowledged and felt now, or they’re feelings that demonstrate how a situation is resonating for you—in other words, they’re your own inner compass.

    Sadly, although traditions like Buddhism have been teaching us how to develop emotional awareness for thousands of years, we’ve somehow landed on two dominant, ineffective responses.

    Acting on our emotions or trying to brush them under the rug.

    Brushing an emotion under the rug will only keep it trapped inside of you. Meaning it will resurface to bother you as many times as it needs to in the future until you deal with it.

    And the practices of toxic positivity fall under this category. Write a gratitude list and look for the best-feeling thought you can find, they say. In other words, avoid the “negative” emotion for now and let it fester under the surface a little while longer.

    Newsflash: No emotion is negative unless it’s fueling a negative action or reaction. It’s simply feedback pointing you toward growth or clarity.

    Which brings me to the next dominant response we resort to. Acting on the emotion (by yelling at someone, for example) will at least give it an opportunity to release but will most likely create consequences that won’t serve you. We’ve all been there and done that, so no judgment here.

    As I emphasized earlier, the only person who’s ever responsible for your emotions is you. And we tend to act on our emotions by deflecting this responsibility. So we learn, understand, and gain nothing from them.

    So, I sat with the anger. I was fully present with it—by itself, separate from any experience or event that I could possibly associate it with.

    I acknowledged it, felt its full intensity, and breathed through it. I sat with the parts of me that felt this emotion with compassion. I surrendered to letting it move through me.

    Despite having felt the intensity of this anger for a few days, it released fairly quickly when I leaned into it. And when it released, I was able to see pretty clearly why being ill had triggered this anger.

    I’ve also noticed that since this whole experience, the little surges of anger I’d previously felt have gone away. So far I haven’t felt those triggers since, which is a relief.

    Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that many of us are carrying deep trauma that’s often too painful to even fathom triggering. So have compassion for yourself in whatever you feel, and don’t put off seeking the right support to work through your emotions if you feel you need this.

    Now, this might sound counterintuitive, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable to do at first. But real emotional awareness—and maturity—means sitting with the emotion and feeling its fullness.

    It’s identifying what this emotion is and how it feels. Including where you can feel it physically.

    It’s giving yourself some time and space to focus on really leaning into the emotion and separating it from any narrative or incident it may be associated with. Focusing on the emotion by itself in isolation allows us to process it. Without blame, justification, or self-pity.

    When you can truly feel, acknowledge, and breathe through it, it releases. And when it’s released, you’re able to understand what it represented for you. You grow through it.

    This may take time, but a feeling is only ever there to be felt. And until it is, it will be increasingly vociferous in how it tries to get your attention.

    This can require a lot of courage, especially because too many of us have been conditioned to fear feeling our emotions and believe that we can’t handle them.

    But if you need to cry, cry. If it feels intense, this is where deeply buried stuff is surfacing for release.

    And when you let an emotion move through you, you let it move out of you.

    This doesn’t mean that you’ll never feel another “negative” emotion ever again.

    But it does mean that you’ll understand how to respond to these emotions and allow them to be felt and understood with a lot more compassion.

    And that’s more than worth the temporary discomfort.

  • Why The Old Adage “Enjoy Every Moment” May Be More Harmful Than Helpful

    Why The Old Adage “Enjoy Every Moment” May Be More Harmful Than Helpful

    “In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” ~Francis Bacon

    One phrase my husband and I have heard often since becoming new parents—heck, since I was still waddling my way through my last trimester—is, “It goes so fast.” This is most often delivered by another more seasoned mother with an all-knowing shake of her head and a longing gaze at my once rotund belly, or now at our beautiful boy.

    We smile and nod, silently agreeing to the harsh reality of time. Which inevitably leads to the dreaded follow up, “Enjoy every moment!” This is usually spoken at a higher, more fervent, almost frantic timber as she smiles hugely at us.

    The thing is, I know she means well. I know that her child(ren) must be older and that she has undoubtedly forgotten the reality of the many difficulties with which new parents are faced as they begin to navigate the oftentimes muddy waters of raising a child.

    I also now know that because of the prevalence of phrases like, “Enjoy every moment,” many new parents are unable to reconcile the very real conflicting emotions of loving their children so much that at times it is hard to breathe, while at the same time feeling for any myriad of reasons like they don’t measure up. Or that because they aren’t, in fact, enjoying every minute, that they must somehow be failing as a parent and a person.

    A couple of months before my son was born I bumped into a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while. The typical conversation between a fairly new mother and woman in late stage pregnancy ensued.

    We discussed how I was feeling; she made a fleeting comment about her back labor, encouraging me to be open-minded about any birth plan I might have in place; and then she said something so outlandish and foreign that I couldn’t in that moment find the words with which to respond.

    She told me, with great certainty, that there would be things I would endure in the very near future that would be almost incomprehensibly difficult, and that in no way would I enjoy them all.

    I was stunned. But it wasn’t that she spoke the truth that stunned me; it was that everyone else I had come into contact with hadn’t.

    In that moment, I was more grateful to her than she’ll ever know. Right there, at the entrance to the grocery store, she granted me permission to honestly experience all that lie ahead on the bumpy, blissful path of motherhood.

    Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. At least not in those first few months when every cry my son emitted from his frighteningly fragile little body left me panic-stricken and absolutely sure that I was simply not cut out to be a mother.

    Not because I wasn’t doing every possible thing in my power to care for and nurture my boy. But because there is nothing enjoyable about massive hormonal shifts, staggering sleep deprivation, unexpected postpartum anxiety, and three bouts of excruciating mastitis.

    It wasn’t until my husband—bless his kind and patient heart—asked me, after one agonizingly long and sleepless night, what I had expected life with a newborn to be that I remembered my friend’s wise, and let’s face it, frightening words.

    I realized then my perception of what my experience as a new mother should be had become quite skewed. I also realized that it was thanks to all those well-meaning, “Enjoy every moment” comments that I found myself floundering to make sense of just how I was supposed to manage to do that—and if I was unable to, then surely there must be something inherently wrong with me.

    Maybe you think I’m being too literal. Surely everyone knows you can’t possibly enjoy every moment.

    Okay sure, I’ll give you that. But I’ll also argue that our words and thoughts carry great weight. And with that weight often comes unrealistic expectations, both of ourselves and of others. This is true for all of us in any given situation, parent or not.

    Plus, I think the issue runs deeper than simple semantics. Let’s face it, most of us have spent a large majority of our lives constructing often intricate and elaborate means of avoiding pain and discomfort.

    We go well out of our way to escape those pesky emotions that leave us feeling vulnerable. We choose, instead, to focus only on what we, and society as a whole, has deemed “good” or “positive” rather than risk putting our more “negative” thoughts and experiences out into the universe. You’ve heard this, right?

    While I am a staunch believer in the power we have to manifest and create our own reality, I am also convinced that we cannot simply bypass the harder, more uncomfortable aspects of the human experience.

    It is not surprising then, that it has been in my new role as both an ecstatic and scared new mother that I have found there is absolutely no place in which to escape from anything. After all, my child’s cries of discomfort and/or discontent cannot, in any language or universe, be denied. And this, I have found, is a good thing. It literally keeps him alive.

    Well, we were all babies once. Maybe there is a trace of that survival instinct still hibernating within each of us. Maybe our own fears and discomforts are coming up when necessary as a way to keep us alive, too. Or at the very least, to wake us up.

    During the first six euphoric and arduous months of my son’s life, I began to awaken to the paradox of my new situation.

    I had been granted the greatest gift I will ever receive in this life. It’s true. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Yet it is because of that very greatness that I was unable to allow for the intense feelings of discomfort I felt when faced with the very natural sense of overwhelm that comes with being a new mother.

    I, like many others in any number of life’s scenarios, believed that I had no right to feel the tough stuff when I was so obviously blessed with such a massive amount of good.

    But just as I believe we need the darkness to appreciate the light, I am also certain that I needed—and must continue—to allow myself to fully surrender to and move through those harder, oh so unenjoyable moments. For it was and is in the moments when I have thought I had nothing left to give that I learned just how good a mother I actually am.

    I have learned, time and again, the lengths I will go to for my son. I have abolished the limitations I unknowingly set for myself simply by being faced with staggeringly hard situations and circumstances.

    Ironically, It is because of these situations that I now trust myself and my capabilities more than ever before.

    It’s unreasonable to think we should enjoy every moment, and that if we don’t, we’re doing something wrong. So let yourself off the hook. You never know, it just might result in you enjoying life’s messy process and all the glorious moments in between that much more.

  • When Mindfulness Hurts: Feeling Is the Key to Healing

    When Mindfulness Hurts: Feeling Is the Key to Healing

    “You start watching your breath and all your problems are solved. It is not like that at all. You are working with the heart of your experiences, learning to turn towards them, and that is difficult and can be uncomfortable.” ~Ed Halliwell

    Can mindfulness be bad for you?

    I had been expecting it: Once you become a regular at it, mindfulness permeates all aspects of your life.

    I only sit in meditation for twenty minutes daily (and a full hour on Sundays), but I carry its effects with me the rest of the time, elevated levels of awareness and all.

    This is not to say that I constantly float on a blissful cloud. In fact, this sudden increase in mindfulness, even for someone used to deep introspection and resolutely committed to lucidity, comes at a certain cost. What I hadn’t expected was the actual weight of mindfulness.

    Three months into the daily practice of mindful meditation, I had to admit that it was not solely eliciting the deep serenity I had hoped for. In fact, I realized that in some ways, I actually felt less happy than before.

    I couldn’t precisely put my finger on it. All I knew was that things seemed heavier, more raw. How could that be? Wasn’t mindfulness supposed to help me transcend the vicissitudes of life? What was I doing wrong? Was I the only one in that odd situation?

    I decided to do some research. It didn’t take long before I discovered evidence that mindfulness can indeed have “side effects.”

    A quick online search showed me that I’m actually in very good company. Mindfulness, and the practice of meditation, has reportedly entailed significant “downsides” for a number of enthusiasts.

    We come to mindfulness in the hope that it will constitute the path to peacefulness, often unaware that this path is paved with cracked and bumpy stones. Only after stepping onto that road do you realize how uncomfortable the process can be.

    Just like therapy, meditating is difficult, sometimes painful.

    The first and most obvious reason is that sitting still, quieting the mind, and focusing on the breath presents a real challenge. Many beginners and non-beginners complain of an overwhelming restlessness or, on the contrary, of an irresistible tendency to fall asleep (I belong to the latter category).

    The second reason is that mindfulness has a way of annihilating our blissful ignorance. It offers an unexpected and unparalleled insight into our areas of vulnerability, the sides of us that we are not always prepared to welcome nonjudgmentally.

    To get the most of it, one must recognize that the practice of mindfulness is dirty, hard work.

    According to Willoughby Britton, a Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University Medical School, the downsides of mindfulness range from mild to severe, and can manifest in various ways—from unexpected anger and anxiety all the way to depression and psychosis.

    Mindfulness can exacerbate a number of mental health conditions, bring back to the surface traumatic memories, or simply force you to deal with things that had conveniently been swept under the rug.

    Whatever your initial levels of stability (or instability), a lot can emerge in the first stages of the regular practice of meditation. Ready or not, you have to deal with it. It is disconcerting at best. In my case, it was sometimes downright depressing.

    Picture a handful of Band-Aids applied to different spots on your body. Each Band-Aid conveniently covers an injury that you’re happy to ignore (or so you think).

    Mindfulness is like peeling off the Band-Aids, one by one. It hurts.

    Then you discover what’s under them: A bad cut here. A big bruise there. The occasional infected wound. A few badly healed scars. Mindfulness makes it hard to ignore that you are, under all those Band-Aids, actually hurting, or at least not entirely recovered.

    To add insult to the injury, mindfulness has a way of preventing you from applying new Band-Aids. Things that we considered pleasant, and that help us deal with life’s vagaries, lose their appeal once we become aware of their true purpose and associated costs.

    We use, in our daily lives, an arsenal of strategies, often without knowing it: thinking patterns, daily habits, activities we view as pleasurable “add-ons,” such as eating, shopping, staring at a screen, and so on. We don’t perceive those “pursuits” as Band-Aids. Aren’t they the spice of life?

    The regular practice of meditation and a more mindful approach to life, however, sheds some light on our dependence. Any behavior that resists modification might indicate an addiction, even if it was just to chocolate, new running shorts, or social media.

    I am now, more than ever, aware of my coping mechanisms, aware that rather than making life interesting, they mostly patch up an aspect of my existence that requires attention.

    If I feel bored, tired, or stressed, no amount of sweets, sports gear, or Internet surfing will truly fill the void or fulfill the need.

    Where I would mindlessly resolve to an old habit, this new knowledge stops me in my tracks. I pause, observe, notice the underlying emotion or sensation.

    If I’m under work-related stress, such as a quickly approaching deadline, or a recalcitrant passage to translate, I will often have a sudden craving for sweets, or feel the pressing need to check my Facebook page. It’s not a coincidence, I know that now, but I needed mindfulness to realize it fully.

    Now, instead of walking to the cupboard or opening a new tab in my browser, I stay put and take a deep breath. I skip the coping mechanism and refrain applying a new Band-Aid or replacing an old one.

    Even my thought processes are modified. When certain situations repeatedly elicited the kind of stress that requires a Band-Aid, I was forced to reconsider, at least to a certain extent, the choices I had been making in various areas of my life: my career path, other types of commitments, and even some relationships. I realized I had too much on my plate and that I needed to respect my limits.

    Accepting the fact that I indeed have limits was no small feat. Even if I have long been aware of some of my “rationalizations” and “compensations,” I have never faced life with such clarity, honesty, and courage. I am proud of it. I am also unsettled.

    In spite of this, I am still fully committed to continue with my mindfulness practice. The cans of worms I am opening can be a handful, but I was carrying them anyway, and they were wearing me down. I choose to deal with them.

    Things might feel very raw, but they also feel very real. I can already sense a new level of lightness and freedom on the other side of this demanding exercise.

    I invite you to give it a try too. As we move along in our mindfulness practice, I trust that we can all find our own sweet spot, the place where an increased awareness meets a renewed sense of well-being.

    For many, this will mean starting slow. When you incorporate mindful meditation into your life, don’t go for the three-day retreat right away. Not only will it be too demanding, it might even backfire.

    Instead, simply find a quiet place where you can sit for at least five minutes, in silence, every day, and focus on the breath.

    You may feel uncomfortable at first, as the feelings you formerly numbed or avoided emerge. Don’t let that deter you. If you embrace the discomfort, you’ll eventually gain the clarity needed to acknowledge and heal old wounds, break unhealthy patterns, and generally step onto the path to a more authentic life.

  • How Pain Can Lead to Pleasure and Why We Should Embrace It

    How Pain Can Lead to Pleasure and Why We Should Embrace It

    “The pain you feel today will be the strength you feel tomorrow.” ~Unknown

    We all hate to suffer, and avoid suffering at all costs. I’ve gone through great lengths to avoid discomfort, pain, and sorrow.

    I stayed with the wrong people to avoid the suffering of letting go; I indulged in tasty, fatty snacks to avoid the suffering of not eating them; and I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day to avoid the suffering involved with quitting.

    I stayed in bed for longer than I should to avoid the discomfort of waking up when I needed to. I didn’t exercise to avoid the misery of running and doing pull ups, even though being unhealthy causes a lot more pain. And I avoided the aching uncertainty by staying within my comfort zone instead of going into the unknown.

    Oh, yes! I’ve avoided hardship in so many ways; however, this constant avoidance of temporary distress led to a postponed agony and never-ending pain.

    My life was out of my own control because of this constant avoidance of suffering. I found temporary pleasure in cigarettes, alcohol, sleep, chocolate, procrastination, and T.V. And so I tried to constantly numb myself with these external pacifiers to keep myself from doing and thinking.

    I didn’t want to think; I didn’t want to face my inner demons because I knew that would bring an even bigger amount of pain. It was like a Band-Aid that I didn’t want to rip off, and so I was slowly taking it off and putting it back on.

    I was miserable most of the time, even while I smoked a cigarette with a glass of wine, but at least they numbed the pain. They made my time endurable but not enjoyable.

    I had a never-ending list of things, errands, and problems that needed addressing, but that I kept postponing. Procrastination is the mother of instant gratification and long-term suffering.

    My life was far away from what I had hoped for or wished for, and there was no one to blame but myself.

    I needed to suffer. I needed to suffer for the right reasons and in the right direction. I needed a temporary amount of suffering so I could have a more durable amount of happiness.

    I needed to feel tired and get things done, I needed to crave that chocolate and not eat it, I needed the suffering of nicotine withdrawal, and I needed to look deep inside myself and suffer so I could fix what was broken.

    I needed to stop fearing the pain and embrace it as part of the battle to achieve something greater, something better.

    Suffering is not bad if you know what your suffering is worth.

    I remember when I told a swami, “I don’t know how to quit the things and people who are bad for me, because it causes me pain to let them go.”

    He replied, “Yes, it might cause you pain, and so what? You suffer a little bit and you gain so much more in return; you avoid greater suffering in the future from getting lung cancer, becoming an alcoholic, getting treated badly, losing your job, etc. Don’t fear suffering if you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

    Nothing ever gets done without a little bit of pain.

    And this is all right. When I pushed myself to what I thought was my limit, I realized that it is limitless on the other side of pain.

    A wise man once told me “Pain is just part of the process of commitment. Nothing ever gets done without a little bit of pain. And when you see the result the pain is gone.”

    Change Your Perception About Suffering

    Pain, discomfort, and displeasure. They’re negative emotions and feelings we need to avoid, right? Not always. It is this precise perception I had toward suffering that kept me enslaved to many things.

    That painful moment when my alarm clock shouted at me to wake up, with my eyes still closed, my head spinning from the glasses of wine I had drank the previous night, my lungs burning from all the cigarettes I had smoked and my heart empty of satisfaction.

    For those few hours of fun, five, maybe six hours of “pleasure,” I had to endure sixteen hours of pain, and this was just the tip of the iceberg.

    Of course, how could I endure the displeasure of not drinking and partying on a Saturday night? “Who cares about tomorrow?” I would think. This is the clearest example of instant gratification and long-term suffering.

    Sometimes we indulge in things that are bad for us only to experience a short amount of pleasure, overlooking the long-term effect.

    Enduring short-term suffering can bring on a greater amount of long-term happiness and pleasure. When things get done, when I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and meditate, exercising and fitting into my clothes, freeing myself from abusive people, when I wake up with a clear head and no hangover. And so, suffering becomes pleasurable.

    Slowly, with one foot after the other, I push myself to long-term happiness. Sometimes I give a step back but always remembering the sweet pleasure that suffering can bring me if only I decide to ache for the right reasons.

  • 5 Ways to Push Through Discomfort to Make Positive Change

    5 Ways to Push Through Discomfort to Make Positive Change

    “Don’t let today’s disappointments cast a shadow on tomorrow’s dreams.” ~Unknown

    One of the most difficult parts of reaching your goals or making positive change is pushing through discomfort.

    This is where a lot of people give up—when the process inspires all kinds of challenging feelings.

    If you’ve quit your day job to pursue your passion and after six months you need to sell your car to keep going, a cubicle may appeal to your need for security.

    If you’d like to get your masters degree but received rejection letters for the fall, your ego might tell you not to reapply.

    If you’d love to let someone into your life but you’re afraid of being hurt, you may bail at the first sign of conflict.

    Maybe your will is strong enough to clear emotional hurdles without flinching; but odds are, you’re at least a little familiar with that nagging inner voice that says, “Go back. It’s too hard. It’s not worth it.”

    Except it is. According to the video 212 degrees, the margin of victory for the last ten years in the Indy 500 has been 1.54 seconds. The margin of victory in all major golf tournaments in the last twenty-five years was only three strokes.

    The day you give up could easily be three strokes before you succeed. Even if your future doesn’t unfold exactly as you’d planned, you’ll never regret what you become through the process of following your bliss.

    Now it’s just about how. How do you separate yourself from your fears so they don’t sabotage your efforts? How do silence that inner voice and force yourself to keep taking step, after step, after step? Here’s what I’m working on now: (more…)