Tonight was the second night of the intenSati creativity workshop I’m participating in, where we bring mindfulness to hardcore aerobics, and get inspired. Everyone in the workshop is an artist of some sort. After the workout, we meditate, and then write and intellectualize our journeys.
Tonight’s lesson was about sitting with discomfort… or rather, identifying what we do to avoid sitting with our discomfort. Our teacher Erin named the series, “Sit. Stay. Heal.” and said her own tendency, when emotional pain comes up, is to get really busy fixing it. It couldn’t be possible that she’s failed to accomplish what she set out to, so she hires coaches, goes to therapy, and takes action to remedy the situation. That’s her instinctive way… but she knows that’s also a way of avoiding the pain and not really the most productive approach; so she tries, and encouraged us to try, to just be with ourselves, and get to the underlying emotion, or fear, and then give that little girl or boy version of ourselves the nurturing it needs.
Erin posed the question to the class – what do we specifically do to avoid the pain? Everyone opened up their journals and started writing. I took the cap off my pen and wrote the shortest (but maybe most powerful) sentence of my life. I didn’t have to think about it; it was right there.
I closed my pen again and looked around the room. Everyone was still writing. What were they writing? I’m usually the last one to finish something like this. I write for as long as they’ll let me! But wasn’t this one incredibly simple?
Erin asked who’d like to share their obfuscatory behavior. Hands shot up. Some people ate, others drank, or slept around. There was a lot of jealousy, and finger pointing. Keeping busy was a real popular one too. With each proclamation came a bit of a personal explanation. I had my hand raised the whole time but Erin didn’t call on me until the very end.
When she did, I said, “I tell the story of what happened. Over and over and over.” I felt a wave of empowerment come over me. An epiphany even, maybe. The room burst out in what felt like a chorus of, "Ahhs" and "Oh yeses." They don't know me. They were nodding to their own tendencies to hide beneath a report. For me, I can say, the storytelling numbs me. It soothes away the loneliness and isolation. With acknowledgment from an audience, I feel a little bit less stupid for my mistakes. But what I realized tonight was, separating from my mistakes distances me from the emotions in them, and that makes it awfully hard to get the lesson... Instead, I need to “Sit. Stay. And Heal.”
So now when I feel myself launching into an animated tale of what’s gone down, I’m going to try to stop, check in with myself, and notice what I'm feeling. Being with discomfort is the only way to grow; and in fact, you can almost use your level of discomfort as a measure of benefit you can expect. Isn't that so true with a physical workout? No pain no gain! Well, damn. Once again the rules of the physical body are strikingly similar to the rules of the emotional body. The number one rule is to guard against serious injury, but without pretty regular tearing and testing... there simply can't be any progress.
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