Discomfort Vs. Pain

In this episode, we explore the difference between experiences that are uncomfortable and those that deeply cause us pain. Together we tease apart the opportunities that discomfort offers us in terms of growth, leaning into our edges, and discovering new truths and wisdom in the breaking of our concepts and shells. What's your growing edge?

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello and welcome back to the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

This is Tiffany Andres Myers,

Your host and whimsically curious adventurer on this human journey.

Today's episode I'm titling Discomfort vs Pain.

And for those of you that were patient enough to listen to the last episode,

You heard that I went through my own experience of depression and anxiety and fear over the last few months.

And thankfully and wonderfully through meditation retreat and practice have found my way back to a sense of love and contentment and joy.

Oh this human journey,

The ups and downs.

But this episode is kind of grounded in the curiosity of the difference between discomfort and pain.

And these are two concepts that I want to define but also kind of broaden for the scope of our conversation today.

That when I talk about discomfort,

What I'm really referencing is kind of the friction that comes up when we experience something in our day to day life that rubs up against our innate conditioning.

And I'll be really forthcoming that this idea between discomfort and pain first kind of came to the forefront of my experience through teaching yoga.

And I really love teaching yoga in such a way where I ask people to explore the really fine textural difference between an experience of discomfort or being uncomfortable and the experience of pain.

In yoga,

One of the first principles that we hope and endeavor to abide by is a word called ahimsa.

And what this means translated out of Sanskrit is essentially nonviolence.

That's not just nonviolence with ourselves but nonviolent action out in the world as well.

But in our yoga practice that means not pushing ourselves beyond our boundaries or our capabilities.

And just to be very open when I was going through yoga teacher training,

My nickname was too much too fast.

I grew up as a gymnast and so I'm pretty flexible.

But what I discovered through yoga teacher training and really diving deeply into my own practice is that I can put my body in pretty much any position but that does not mean that it's actually good for me.

It doesn't mean that it's healthy or healing for my muscles or my ligaments or my joints.

And so there were a few times through the exploration of yoga that I injured myself by going too far.

And I'll just be very open.

Of course what does this come down to?

This comes down to wanting to be the best,

Defining my goodness and my worth by how I related to everybody else in the room and if I could stretch further or hold longer than anyone else then I'm better.

Oh comparison,

The stealer of joy.

So when I began teaching yoga,

I teach yoga in such a way where I'm absolutely going to ask people to hold postures so that they begin to feel the warmth of their muscles working that might turn into a sense of almost burning or tingling.

Your muscles might shake,

You might think in your head I can't hold this any longer,

But being able to be so present to our own body experience that we can tell the difference between I don't want to do this anymore,

This is hard,

And this is painful,

Meaning it's not actually good for me,

Becomes really powerful and important.

Because I find,

At least for myself,

And I imagine that all of you,

Or at least most of you will agree,

That to be human and to live in the world means in some way that discomforts are going to be inherent.

We're going to find inevitably ourselves in positions and experiences that we don't want to be.

When I took MBSR,

I had a teacher that one of her invitations for every single class was to allow life to be as it is,

And that's in contrast to recognizing the moments where we're suffering,

We're in discomfort because we want life to be different than it is.

From everything as silly as sitting in a room and feeling cold,

And all of the stories that come with being cold,

Ugh,

Why did they turn the air conditioning this cold,

It shouldn't be this cold.

So now we're not just experiencing cold,

But we're telling ourselves the story that life should be different,

That it shouldn't be cold,

I shouldn't have to deal with cold.

And inherently,

At least for most of us,

Cold is not pain,

It's not going to break us,

It's not going to harm us,

It's an experience of discomfort,

Dis-ease,

Where something in our outer or inner environment creates a space where we move from being at ease to out of ease and into discomfort or uncomfortable.

And I bring this up because this is kind of at the forefront of really what drove my depression,

My anxieties and my fear,

Is that there were outer circumstances of my life that were changing,

And they were changing quickly,

And they were changing really in beautiful ways,

Which is so funny to look back on now,

How much I was afraid of the change just because it was different than what I was used to,

And it was largely outside of my control.

But what I struggled to understand throughout the experience was exactly what we're talking about today.

I had,

Through the experience of change,

Many moments of discomfort,

And those moments of discomfort became markers of why the things I was experiencing were not fundamentally okay.

Because I had so many moments of discomfort or dis-ease or being uncomfortable,

I felt as though it was clear that these changes were not going to be for my benefit.

And I think this is a thought process that's really natural for all of us.

How do you find yourself in an experience that's uncomfortable where you feel the friction of all of your past conditioning?

Everything that you were taught unconsciously was,

Again,

The way life should be,

And you're finding yourself in these experiences where life is saying,

No,

Fuck that,

This is how it is right now.

And everything inside of you is going,

But I don't know how to fucking deal with this is how it is right now,

I only know how to deal with everything I've been trained and told is the way life should be.

And it's uncomfortable.

We almost have to literally become new people in order to be in a world and in experiences that we've never had before.

And I found myself,

And so in a certain way I feel it's really just part of the human experience that when we find ourselves in these experiences,

The innate response is to reject it,

Right?

The innate response is I don't want this,

Same thing in our yoga practice,

I can't hold this anymore.

But if we can slow down enough to recognize the difference between uncomfortable and painful,

And again I kind of want to define what I mean by painful because uncomfortable is painful in the body,

Right?

Dis-ease,

Being out of ease is painful,

It hurts,

It's absolutely an experience of suffering in mind and body.

But what I mean by pain,

What I mean by this likening to the concept of ahimsa,

Right,

Is being able to tell the difference between an experience that is going to force us to grow and an experience that just inherently really isn't good for us.

When I say pain versus discomfort,

Pain means this is really an experience that's harmful to me from the inside out.

The only opportunity for growth is to reject the circumstances that I'm in and have to hold myself together to endure rather than embrace,

Right?

And I want to be very clear here that there are experiences that we can find ourselves in in our lives that are not okay,

That are a perfect embodiment of pain,

Whether it's an abusive relationship or a horrible boss or a horrible teacher or living in a household with others that don't support and love you,

Whether it's being inauthentic to ourselves in order to please others.

There are a variety of experiences that we as human beings will find ourselves in that it becomes really important to know this is not in my best interest and of benefit to me.

I'm not going to come out of the other side of this better for the experience itself,

Although I do innately believe in human resilience that we can find ourselves in these experiences that aren't good for us and we can still come out the other side better people,

But it's not because the experiences helped us to grow,

But because we were forced to grow or we wouldn't survive,

Right?

And this is a powerful expression of human resilience and strength and again that voice inside of us that's constantly loving us,

Keeping our head above the water.

So it's important to be able to see those experiences where we should say,

Fuck this,

I'm out,

Right?

And to be able to clarify the difference between those experiences and the ones that are presented to us that show us ourselves,

That show us our weaknesses,

That show us the places where we want to be different than what we are,

Even if we don't know it right away,

Right?

And so for me,

The experiences that were changing in my life were ones that have become such an incredibly beautiful source of teaching me to love and trust love in ways that I never have before.

And I'm learning that there are many ways that I still feel uncertain about my own worth,

That there are many ways that I don't trust my loveability.

And before these experiences were brought to me,

I had been very lucky in creating a life with an incredible woman and an incredible son and incredible dogs in a beautiful home,

Working a job that I feel proud of and that is fulfilling to me,

That all of these outer circumstances that I worked so hard to achieve created a life of comfort for me.

I was comfortable a lot of the time,

And in that comfort,

I was happy and content.

And as the circumstances of my life began to change,

Ironically in ways that brought so much more love into it,

It also created a lot of recognition of the places that I still have insecurities.

And so these were these moments where there was friction between what I knew from the past and what I was conditioned to believe and what was sitting right in front of me,

Showing evidence to me that something else could exist instead.

And so this is really kind of the energetic spur for this episode is I have been living kind of the visceral experience of being in discomfort in many moments,

And what I'm finding is that the experience of discomfort can be really fucking amazing.

Like,

Wow,

To see myself in these moments authentically and to see the places where I actually have the space to allow myself to trust more deeply my own loveability and to trust more deeply the love that I'm surrounded by in my life and to not have,

And this is kind of what I'm recognizing,

To not have the quiet undercurrent of mistrust,

Of unworthiness that has really been coloring and flavoring all of my life experiences,

Probably for the entirety of my life.

These experiences of discomfort,

Not pain,

But discomfort are teaching me that that undercurrent doesn't have to be there anymore,

That I can live authentically,

Deeply from a space of trust and love and openness and vulnerability to a depth that I really never thought possible before.

And so my hope in recording this episode for all of you is as you find yourself in these very obviously human experiences of being uncomfortable in your life,

Of things changing,

Of rubbing up against your own conditioning of what you think is right or what you think is wrong or how you think life should be or should feel or should look like,

All of the shoulds,

Can you ask yourself,

Is this an experience where I'm just uncomfortable because it's hard,

Because I don't know how to be myself in this space or I don't know how to be with what's here?

It's going to require a new version of me to live in this and be in joy or is it an experience where authentically it's not good for you?

It's creating pain,

It's creating suffering and to survive it will just be an expression of human resilience,

But not one that the experience brought you the beauty,

But you had to bring the beauty yourself.

So I hope this curiosity brings clarity to those moments that you find yourself in,

Discomfort,

Dis-ease,

Uncertainty,

Uncomfortable and that it invites you to look authentically at your own conditioning,

At the things that are telling you life should be different and in a way to see if you can empty yourself in those moments of all of your conditioning.

Can you become like an empty cup?

There's that old Zen saying where a student comes to the Zen master and asks to receive teachings and the Zen master puts a cup of tea in front of the student and goes to pour him tea and he pours the tea until the cup is overflowing and eventually the student says,

It's overflowing,

It's overflowing and the Zen teacher says,

Exactly,

You can't fill a cup with anything when it's already full.

And what I've come to realize is that for me in these moments of discomfort when I was so busy working with the discomfort and the fear,

When I was so busy fighting against my own discomfort,

I was not empty enough to actually take in what was right in front of me.

So may this episode invite you to the curiosity of the difference between discomfort and pain and may it find you empty in the moments of naturally arising discomfort so that maybe we can learn that there are new ways to perceive the world around us,

New ways to be open to tender and vulnerable and new ways to live in the utmost joy,

Letting life be as it is moment by moment and embracing ourselves and all the love that's around us all the time.

Thank you all so much for listening.

I can't wait to see you next time.

Reviews

Thanks for the authenticity of your own experience & making it relatable. Recovering comparer here now focussing on being empty enough to see what's showing up in this moment. Much appreciated