Hello My Lovely!
Last week we started our exploration of how to allow Lifes challenges and changes to GROW you, rather than allowing them to encourage stagnation or contraction in you.
Back To The Comfort Thing:
Your comfort is more of a concern for the universe than your safety. That's right, the Universe totally WANTs you to be able to live comfortably here in life! But again, the Universe sees big picture, not relative smallness. Meaning life wants your ULTIMATE comfort - which may require relative dis-ease or discomfort in the here and now.
Life knows that your ultimate comfort goes hand in hand with your expansion.
Most of us believe that the ultimate in comfort is when life is predictable. Set up juuuuust how you like it. Change happens when you want it to and not a moment sooner. When all your needs are being met (how you see them anyway) and you are in a constant uninterrupted state of pleasing yourself and being pleased by all that is your life. When you have 'arrived' at that special place and thus never have to make adjustments or adapt or compromise ever again.
This all sounds nice, but the actual REALITY of this situation isn't very nice.
What really happens to people when all they think about is their immediate comfort, is two fold:
1. Their world gets really really small.
2. They become increasingly self-centred in a way that is detrimental to their happiness and fulfillment as a human being.
Let's explore.
1. Their world gets really really small: When you want to feel good right now, and all that matters is what feels good right now, you are going to start to get really nit picky about your environment. You are going to slowly but surly eliminate things that were put in your life to grow and expand you. You will stop hanging out with people who have different views than you. Stop going to activities that require an effort to get too. You will stop participating in more and more things until eventually you are left with a life that is very mundane, routine and boring. And the kicker is, in this you will actually be MORE uncomfortable than you have ever been in your life. This is because as you are focusing on trying to eliminate everything that makes you uncomfortable, you will simply find more and more things that cause you dis-ease. You won't actually become more comfortable, you will simply become less and less tolerant of life itself. Living for immediate comfort - and thus trying to control your environment to suit what you feel are your needs right now - is a perfect recipe for ending up irritated with absolutly everything and totally incapable of being OK. At the same time this endless pursuit for the perfect environment totally derails you from looking to what may actually satisfy, fulfill and thus nourish you into feeling good in your life.
What truly makes one comfortable is the capacity to adapt to whatever is happening. Not eliminating unsavoury circumstances
2. They become increasingly self-centred in a way that is detrimental to their happiness and fulfillment as a human being.: As stated above, as ones attention becomes increasingly focused on creating external comfort, what this usually leads to is a deepening sense that the world is out to get you. That circumstances are proving that life is working against you - otherwise you would not have to be working so hard to get comfortable. This focus then creates a self perpetuating cycle: You reign in the stuff in your life, hoping to make yourself more comfortable - this leads to noticing even more things that feel uncomfortable - which leads to your focusing ever more on yourself and your comfort - because you have tuned your awareness to your discomfort, this is going to be what you see more and more - this justifies your intense focus on getting yourself comfortable, because now you look around and ALL you see is stuff that is making your life worse - you keep trying to make it better, adjusting your external world - the stuff you can't change makes you feel more and more like a victim of circumstance - you can't think about anyone else because now you are, in your mind, the biggest victim of them all. And it really really feels like it too.
The more self focused you get, the more you will feel like a helpless, hapless victim to life. Unloved, unheard and unprotected.
You see how this could lead you to actually feeling WORSE not better in the midst of life throwing you curve balls?
So, what is the solution here? How do you expand rather than contract when life is going nuts on you?
1. Face The Discomfort, And Learn To Be In It, With Yourself: Rather than hunkering down and trying to control life, use the opportunity of everything going topsy turvy to learn to ride the waves. I know this is easier said than done, but the thing is, life is going to keep giving you the opportunity to learn this lesson until you take the bait. So you may as well take the bait. Coupled with this, learn how to be with yourself in your discomfort, rather than checking out through some distracting habit OR berating yourself for thinking and feeling what you think and feel.
Start a journalling practice where you allow yourself to express all that you are feeling. Don't run from your emotions and thoughts about what is happening in your life, but rather go into those feelings and thoughts. Practice sitting in your discomfort for 5-10 minutes a day - and then promise yourself you can do whatever you want to do to try to make yourself feel better after those 5-10 minutes. Express how you are feeling openly and honestly with a friend, and see if you can do so without 'victimizing' yourself with your language. See if you can express what you are feeling without saying things like "this is happening to me." "They are doing this to me." But rather saying things like "I am feeling angry/sad/upset/scared when I contemplate or look at the reality of such and such." When you feel sad/scared/angry/like contracting, rather than getting upset with yourself, simply place your hands over your heart, tell yourself it is ok, and ask what you can do to make you feel safe and loved right now. It is amazing what this level of self acceptance can do for a person.
Learn to be with the discomfort, to make friends with it. Learn to love the emotions that bubble up in you through it. Learn to get curious about how this is all working.
Which leads to step number two.
2. Focus on How It Is All Blessing You - Look For The Evidence Of Your Being Blessed: Rather than putting yourself into the victim role of your circumstances, start to assume that you are being blessed by what is happening. Start every day with the intention that you are going to see the blessing in everything that is happening FOR you in your life (you see what I did there? FOR you not TO you?)
Draw to mind all the other times life called you to expand via a destruction, and how that worked out for you. How you came out the other side better, stronger, with something you never knew you wanted. Start to look for evidence of how your current circumstances are providing an opportunity for you to learn, grow, become something you never knew you could become.
Look for how the destruction is actually exactly what you have been asking for. Meaning start to allow yourself the awareness that when life throws you a curve ball, it is actually doing so in RESPONSE to you having asked for something better. Life is doing this in order to provide you with YOUR REQUEST for deeper love, deeper purpose, more passion, deeper happiness, more fulfillment.
You must realize, that in the end, you asked for this destruction with your longing for more.
So let it all get destroyed, so that there is room for what you want.
You are most comfortable right outside your comfort zone. You are happiest when you are living a life of service that fulfills your soul.
Expansion is the name of the game.
So go with it.
<3
