Sitting With The Discomfort
An important tenet in meditation is that when we’re sitting with our back straight and legs folded under us, soon enough the body starts to remind us of its presence. Aches and pains creep up or get worse and sometimes, they get pretty unbearable. Vipassana, the buddhist form of meditation, instructs to observe the pain without moving. After a while, the pain might simply disappear or break down into a series of sensations that we can observe without having to react to. This is a really helpful life skill. It teaches us to be in harmony with whatever is and not try to control it.
What does this really mean though? If someone is coming towards me with a big stick in their hands intending to bash my head, should I stay in the situation and watch how my body tenses? No, because we are not talking about exploring the discomfort that comes with a fractured skull! We should respond to the situation and get the hell out of there as soon as possible. But once we are in the safety of our homes, how do we put the scary incident behind us? How do we make sure that those few moments of terror don’t become a prison for our lifetime?
The example I used is an extreme one. There are hundreds of smaller or more benign situations where we are trapped everyday. We might be having difficulty at work or not be happy with how our kids are behaving or find a particular habit of our spouse really triggering.
Recently, I faced one such situation. Having moved to India from US recently, my 4 year old was struggling to adjust to his new school, especially with writing. Yeah, you read that correctly. Writing! A 4 yr old! Why a 4 yr old is being forced to write pages and pages of alphabets is a topic that deserves its own blogpost. Meanwhile, let’s come back to our situation. I didn’t want my son to feel bad at school and decided to sit with him for 30 minutes everyday to help him catch up. I was actually a little proud of myself for being such a caring parent. To my surprise or rather indignation, he didn’t think so! The little mule dug his heels in and proceeded to make those 30 mins as unpleasant as possible for me. I tried to be patient till I finally blew up. The same thing happened the next day and the day after. This got to a point where my son and I were in a daily Mexican standoff, each not willing to budge at all.
We are living in a prison created by our own minds.
I was furious at the ungrateful kid! I vented to some people, read parenting articles online, called his teacher names (in my head of course). But then I realized that I was doing all of this only to get away from actually “being” with the problem. It was so much easier (and infinitely more entertaining) to vent or get lost in random online surfing. Who was I kidding? The solution wasn’t going to be in some parenting blog. It was within me. I simply had to let it surface.
I mulled over the issue as I went on a couple of device-free walks by myself. I also sat with the problem a few times after my meditation sessions. Gradually, what was really bothering me started coming up. Was it so much about discipline or helping my kid? Or was it about my expectation that my son should do well at school? When the reality didn’t match up to that (in such a trivial way), I desperately tried to “fix” the situation. On digging deeper, I saw that feelings of inadequacy were also involved. I have always had this pattern of feeling “not enough" and I added that as well to the melee of emotions. It developed into this nagging, subconscious worry that I was failing as a parent at some level.
Fear of judgement from others was a key player and then there were some pretty silly assumptions on top of that. I had taken the struggles of a toddler and constructed this horror movie in my head where 20 years down the line, my kid would be unemployed and homeless. All because he wasn’t crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s at the age of four!
You’re not the only one laughing at me here. I’m laughing at myself too. So basically, it all boiled down to my tendency to be a drama queen.
Once I saw all the baggage I had brought to the situation, I was able to see the humor in it. And just like that, the Mt. Everest shrunk down and became the molehill it had always been. Rather than a daunting challenge, it became quite a fun activity where I could laugh at the cuteness of a toddler.
This is such a trivial, such a slice-of-my-life example because when we add up all the slices, it sums up to our entire life. Every obstacle is an an opportunity to discover ourselves more. We are not here to make money or garner fame or to do whatever the current pop culture tells us to. We are here to discover ourselves fully. And every tough situation can be used as sandpaper to polish off the dust and see ourselves more clearly.
A difficult situation is an opportunity for growth. Instead of trying to “fix” the situation, focus on what is it within you that’s getting triggered. Try to see the situation with a different set of eyes.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust
The next time you’re upset and are tempted to check your social media feed, sit with yourself for a few minutes instead. Be with your boredom, your anger, your sadness, with whatever emotion you might be struggling with. Sometimes, those pesky feelings are only seeking our attention. As long as we keep get distracted as a way to escape our emotions, they keep chasing us. If we sit with them for a few minutes instead of shooing them away, they themselves dissipate to reveal the underlying patterns. Once we can see the underlying patterns, we can choose what to address and what to ignore. If we want to transcend our problems, we have to get our hands dirty. We have to get comfortable with discomfort. That is the way to true freedom.
