Discomfort
Most of us will do anything to keep comfortable — physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially, mentally.
Some of us only find comfort in being uncomfortable — thriving (surviving) in harshness and extremes.
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Both ways are designed to protect us from feeling feelings.
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For the former group, the objective is to avoid uncomfortable feelings. Pretty straightforward, and perfectly sensible — why shouldn't you be comfortable when you can be comfortable?
As long as you're not avoiding life and healthy expressions of it, comfort seems like a noble enough goal to me.
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For the latter group, the objective is to avoid feelings altogether, while also feeling feelings. Not so straightforward, and not so sensible.
This is the faction of big feelers who don't know how to feel 🙋, so we turn off the internal mechanism altogether.
That doesn't work, and the big feelings go underground, or inward, and we turn to increasingly extreme subconscious measures to express (or repress) them -- dissociation of all sorts, addictions of all sorts, dangerous activities of all sorts.
Pretty quickly, this causes us to not be able to feel the little things, the nuance, the beautiful complexity of life. Which is uncomfortable too.
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Discomfort is inevitable and ubiquitous. What's your relationship with it like?
Can you welcome it in, or do you prefer to keep it at bay?
What methods do you employ when you must sit with it, and when you work to keep it at bay?
How do you relate with others during uncomfortable times, or when you're feeling uneasy, or when you don't get what you want?
Do you explore discomfort by choice, or only when it forces its way in?
Do you feel in integrity with how you seek comfort in your life and relationships?
How do you want to relate to discomfort?
❤️
- S
