The willingness to suffer is… the secret to meditation

I started a new practice a few weeks back — on the surface it looks like meditation, but it’s really an exercise in what I’m calling radical discomfort.

I’ve written before about my struggle with meditation. It was a struggle I’d never satisfactorily resolved. I always meditated sporadically, doing it more because I felt like I “should” than because I really wanted to.

Until a few weeks ago, when I started reading Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching and the following passage caught my eye:

“If you let yourself be blown to and fro,
you lose touch with your root.
If you let restlessness move you,
you lose touch with who you are.”

Those few lines hit me really hard.

There have been so many times in my life when I’ve let restlessness move me — and in doing so I have often felt myself become disconnected from the truth of who I am.

Restlessness has shown up in so many ways in my life: as procrastination, as a short attention span, as physical fidgeting, as a kind of semi-permanent muscle tension that kept me braced against painful sensations and emotions I was unwilling to feel.

The contemplation of those lines lead me into deep inquiry as to what exactly restlessness is.

Here’s what I concluded:

Restlessness is the unwillingness to feel discomfort.

We feel restless when we’re bored or agitated or stressed or in physical discomfort.

But in avoiding the experience of our own discomfort we avoid the truth of who we are in that moment.

For the past two weeks now I’ve been practicing a daily meditation that looks just like every other seated meditation I have ever done. I set my timer for 10-20 minutes, I seat myself cross-legged on my meditation cushion, I close my eyes, I place my palms on my thighs.

And then I remain still in the face of my own restlessness.

I stare my discomfort in the face.

I endure each aching and relentless second that fills the 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes that I have committed myself to.

I used to think that the discomfort was a distraction from the point of meditation.

After all, wasn’t meditation about feeling calm and peaceful? Wasn’t meditation supposed to help me reduce anxiety?

And the answer to those questions is yes, and yes.

But I’m increasingly convinced that meditation doesn’t do this by turning down our experience of suffering — it does it by helping us to turn up our willingness to suffer.

In meditation we meet our pain on the floor.

We have the opportunity to observe, to witness our pain, our discomfort, our restlessness.

We have the opportunity to witness our resistance to the reality of things.

And we have the opportunity to choose a new path:

A path of willingness, a path that invites us to really ask ourselves “this hurt, is it so bad? is it a problem? is it really troubling me right now?”

When I asked these questions of myself I found, to my surprise, that the answer was no.

I noticed that when I chose to sit and witness my restlessness, my uncomfortable emotions, my physical pain — I found that none of these things were so bad as I had imagined them to be when I was trying not to look at them.

Therein lies the real secret to meditation, I think — the secret I’d been missing.

Meditation is an opportunity to meet our discomfort with open curiosity and warm friendliness and seek the truth of whether or not the discomfort we’ve been avoiding really is as bad as we’d thought. (In my experience it’s usually not.)

But in order for the process to work we have to be willing to really look at our discomfort.

We have to be willing to stare our suffering in the eyes.

—

Now it’s your turn! Do you meditate? If so, do you practice a radical willingness to witness your own discomfort? How do you interpret those lines from the Tao Te Ching? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

January 14, 2016

“It’s not that bad” and other lies we tell ourselves

I want to say a few words about toleration. About putting up with the aspects of your life that “aren’t that bad”.

“It’s not that bad” is how we stay stuck for years in situations that make us miserable.

“It’s not that bad” is a lie that we tell ourselves, usually because not telling the lie means facing a scarier truth.

“It’s not that bad” is the lie I’ve told myself for years about my chronic back pain.

And you know what? On the one hand, I’m so right. My pain is really not that bad.

Compared to all of the people out there suffering from truly debilitating chronic pain, my wimpy little back pain is barely a blip on the record. It really is not that bad.

But the thing is that when you play in the Suffering Olympics, no one wins — why would you want to when the prize is nothing less than abject misery?

And yet the ego longs to play. The ego longs to be the best at everything — including being the best at suffering.

For years I’ve used this as an excuse. I’ve told myself this lie that my pain doesn’t deserve my attention because “it’s not that bad”.

It’s like saying that poverty in America doesn’t deserve our attention because “it’s not that bad” compared to poverty in Africa. It’s an equation that really just doesn’t compute — surely both are tragedies in their own right?

The same is true of our personal suffering. All suffering deserves our attention, from the smallest ache to the fiercest agony — our suffering deserves our attention, our compassion, our tender care.

This is what I’ve learned about suffering.

Tolerating our suffering doesn’t make us martyrs. It doesn’t make us kinder, more loving, and more generous people.

Toleration isn’t adequate to transmute pain into love.

To enact such a feat, an act far more courageous than toleration is required — an act of acceptance, an act of surrender is required.

Putting up with the places where we chafe against the edges of our life doesn’t make us any kinder or more noble than our fellow man.

Because the real truth is that even if “it’s not that bad” — it’s also not that good either.

When we’re willing to suffer “not that bad”, we deny ourselves “good”, and we shut down our ability to witness our suffering compassionately.

Putting up with our dissatisfactions almost always does exactly the opposite — it makes us discontented, more easy to anger, less able to extend compassion to others, and more apt to wallow in our righteousness.

When we’re wallowing in our suffering we can’t be of service to those who need us.

Which is the real reason why we have to look at the places where we’re tolerating — the areas of our lives that don’t suit us. We have to look at the aches and the pains and the discontents and the frustrations — because only when we do this can we move into a kinder, more beautiful, and more generous life.

The kind of life we always knew deep in our hearts we were capable of.

The kind of life we’ve yearned for.

The kind of life we thought we’d never be lucky enough to have.

The kind of life that is available to each and every one of us when we’re willing to look our discontents square in the face and fight our way through to the something more we’ve always dreamed of.

Because healing begins when we dare to tell ourselves the brutally honest truth.

All of which is a rather long and dramatic way of saying that I’ve gone ahead and signed myself up for some physical therapy and have been taking a deep dive into mind-body coaching techniques because I’m done tolerating being in pain all the time — even when it really is “not that bad”.

What kind of life do you yearn for? Where in your life are you done tolerating a situation that causes discontent? I’d love to hear from you in the comments! And if you’d like to take this conversation deeper, I invite you to work with me.

January 7, 2016

What it really means to invite rest into your life

I find I keep returning to thoughts about stillness and rest and what it means to invite stillness into our lives — what it means to invite rest. Perhaps this is because I still feel deeply tired most of the time, and so restless. Perhaps this is because I still struggle daily to invite rest into my life.

To invite rest into my life feels so radically counter-culture in our ever-busier modern society.

To invite rest is to turn off the TV even though you haven’t seen the most recent episode of The Big Bang Theory and it’s airing next.

To invite rest is to put down the book, perhaps even to choose not to finish the book at all, even if you’re a hundred pages in.

To invite rest is to put yourself to bed even when you really don’t want to.

And then to invite rest is to remember that falling asleep is not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to lie in the dark, warmly snuggled beneath the covers, and to remember what it is to rest: a body prone, a body still, a body breathing slowly. Your responsibility is to close the eyes and calm the mind, to rest in that contentment and let sleep do what it will.

To invite rest is to take a walk in the middle of the work day even though you don’t feel you’re supposed to or to get up for another glass of water or to use the bathroom even though you just got up for another glass of water or to use the bathroom not very long ago.

To invite rest is sometimes ten minutes alone in the empty bathroom, doing nothing at all except pondering the freckles on your thighs and listening to the hum of the fans overhead — buzzing like your own unsettled thoughts.

To invite rest is, inevitably, to say no.

To say no to your friends and your family, to say “I’m going to bed now” and then to walk out of the room, to say “Sorry but I can’t go to your party” even though the only thing you had planned was a quiet night at home.

To invite rest is to create space for yourself in the face of your obligations, in the face of your dreams and desires — to say no to the 10,000 things that compete for your attention in every moment, the ideas, the inspirations, the notifications on your phone, the ever-scrolling social media feeds, the news ticker tape that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls with a million human tragedies you didn’t know about until now.

To invite rest is to clear the decks, to pare down to just what is essential and then to carve out hours and minutes for your rest

For sleep, for meditation, for writing, for going on a walk to no-place in particular, for coloring or painting or sketching, for meeting yourself on the pages of your journal or inscribing your dreams into physical reality with a pair of scissors and a glue stick and all the hope you can muster from the very depths of your heart.

And the thing I am trying, but maybe also failing to say is that we talk about rest like it’s supposed to be easy and I think it might be the very hardest thing in the world.

To invite rest is often to take your own needs and put them higher than everyone else’s.

It’s dangerous to think that this placing of needs as priorities is an act of selfishness — an ungenerous act of greed. That this lying down in the dark when we are tired is a luxury that might prevent us from being the kindhearted and generous people we know deep down we were meant to be.

And, of course, it isn’t easy to put our needs first — it isn’t easy because there’s so much muchness out there: so many books to read, TV shows to enjoy, children to feed, friends to spend time with. There’s so much out there to be and see and do.

But in order to be and see and do all the things we want to we have to first honor our limitations.

The change has to start in us and for us and it has to start with our ability to care for ourselves, with our ability to reclaim our need to rest, our need to eat and to drink and to pee.

The story of making life beautiful and kind and meaningful begins with our ability to reclaim the worthiness of our untended needs and our ability to say no.

The world doesn’t need us to show up tapped out and numbed out and drugged up and exhausted.

There are enough of us walking around like that already.

The world needs us to show up strong and rested and ready to rumble so that we might find hope of healing in our broken and battered places.

And healing begins, as always, with a period of heightened rest.

What are you healing from? Let me know in the comments below!

December 31, 2015

Why I won’t be setting goals for 2016

I want to tell you a story about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals.

You see, when I was a little girl I used to get so excited at the prospect of New Year’s Resolutions. I would set these wildly impossible goals (my most common one was to write in my journal daily — which never worked for me…).

Every year I would set these lofty goals, these grand ambitions, and then January would turn into February and I would run out of enthusiasm or energy and my ambitions would fall by the wayside.

What I learned from this experience was that I was a disappointment.

I learned that I could expect to disappoint myself. It was a hard lesson to swallow — and it eventually turned me off of goal-setting forever.

Year after year I made my goals smaller and smaller and smaller until it seemed like I would be unable to disappoint myself — and still I always managed it.

Is your history with setting goals a similarly fraught and damaging one?

If so, then I’m happy to inform you that I’ve since discovered I was making two critical goal-setting mistakes.

The first mistake was that I usually set “self-improving” goals for myself.

You know the ones I’m talking about — the resolve that this will be the year you finally lose those 15 lbs, or the year you’ll hit the gym 3 times a week religiously, or the year you’ll write in your journal every single day.

You can tell a goal is of the “self-improving” sort because you’re really sure you should set it but you really don’t want to. If the idea of dragging yourself to the gym three times a week feels heavy and sluggish in your body, then you’ve found yourself a “self-improving” resolution that I’m prepared to bet right now you won’t keep past Valentine’s day.

The second mistake was that I set quantitative goals, not qualitative ones

You could argue that this is kind-of cheating. But if you set your goal to be “write in journal every day” the first day you miss it (for any reason) your brain will inform you that you’ve failed, that you are an awful disappointment, and that you should feel eternally guilty. Or at least that’s what my brain does — your brain may be less fundamentally broken…

HOWEVER.

If your goal is not to “write in journal every day” but is to “journal often” or “journal regularly” or “make time to journal at least one time each week” then this is a much more achievable which you are less likely to fail at (although if your goal is of the self-improving sort, then there’s usually no hope for it…).

But for those of you out there who are as goal-shy as I am these days — here’s what I suggest you actually do.

I suggest you kick goals to the curb and try something new: set intentions for the new year and decide on what you’re no longer willing to tolerate. Because this works so, so much better for me.

So here I go.

In 2016 I am no longer willing to tolerate:

Feeling exhausted all the time
Having my time pulled in too many directions
Trying to squeeze more out of the same number of minutes
Letting other people’s needs steamroll my own
Feeling guilty for having needs that defy societal expectations

In 2016 I intend to:

Live courageously
Take bold actions
Let myself be seen
Trust my body
Honor my need for rest
Ask for support when I need it
Admit when I’m overextended

And, for the overachiever special, my word or theme for 2016 is

And you might think that those aren’t specific enough and concrete enough and how will I know when I’ve achieved them? (gasp!), but I think that’s actually the beauty of defining your goals for the year ahead in this way.

I’ll know when I’ve achieved them because I will feel bold, I will feel daring, I will feel rested, and I will feel like I’m stepping into the shoes that have been waiting for me all my life.

And yes, I’ll be turning those lists of things I’m not longer willing to tolerate and of intentions into concrete actions — but the trick, you see, is that those actions are not my goals.

Those actions are just ideas for things I might do to bring my life into better alignment with my goals. And if I fail at some of them or decide in June that I’m not interested in those ideas anymore I haven’t failed at my goals — I’ll still be right on target just as long as I keep checking in and realigning myself with my intentions as I navigate the twists and turns of 2016.

I’d love to hear from you! What’s your relationship to goal-setting? Love them? Hate them? Love-to-hate them? Let me know what you’re doing to prepare for the coming year in the comments below. And if you’ve picked a word or a theme for 2016, I DARE you to share it! 😉

December 17, 2015

I’ve spent my whole life asking the wrong question…

I have an uncomfortable confession to make. You see, I was born with a question on my lips and I’ve spent pretty much entire life trying to answer it. Which is why it’s been uncomfortable for me to realize in the past month or two that I’m pretty sure I’ve been asking exactly the wrong question all my life.

That question, by the way, is “why?”.

Since I was first old enough to formulate this question it has plagued me — amounting to a total span of time far greater than the normal four-year old fixation.

One of the lovely women I coach with has dubbed me “the one with a hypothesis for everything” — and it’s so true.

Every mystery, every puzzle, every question — I am fixated, transfixed, addicted. I chew them over and over in my mind, obsessed with figuring out the why of things until I happen upon a plausible explanation. Only they is my curiosity sated.

But.

As I’ve been thinking about 2016 and what I want to do in the coming year(s) of my life, I’m starting to realize that the question “why?” is ultimately a trap.

“Why” leads invariably to a line of questioning in which the world becomes an murky, impossible place and every decision is weighed down by 10,000 confounding variables.

Under the burden of “why?”, even the simplest decision becomes impossible.

In deciding what to have to dinner one must know why chicken might be better than beef, why Indian food might be better than Chinese, why it might be important to buy organic, etc.

Under the burden of “why” a decision cannot be decided under the auspices of reasons such as “because I want to” (why?) or “because it sounds good” (why?).

Instead, a decision must be infinitely logical and well defended. Under the burden of “why?”, all possible reasons must be vindicated and validated and living your life rapidly begins to feel impossible.

Which is why I’ve decided to start asking a new question: “Why not?”

It’s possible that I find this magical just because I’m going through a phase of some sort… but bear with me for a second if you’re feeling skeptical.

“I feel like having chicken for dinner.” Why not?
“I think I’ll meditate this evening before bed.” Why not?
“Should I skip class tonight and go to bed early?” Why not!

“Why not?” is almost always immediate permission to move in the direction you wanted to go anyways.

As a coach, this is probably something I should have figured out a long time ago — because I ask my clients why-questions a lot in order to help me understand how they see their world.

But I don’t ask “why?” or “why do you think that?” or “why is that?” very often.

Instead, I usually ask questions like “why would that be bad?” or “why would that be a problem?” or “so what?” or “who cares?” (or “why *not*?”!).

When we ask ourselves these “why not?” questions we can see immediately to the heart of the matter.

Because the answers that come up are always are excuses.

“I might fail.” “It’ll never work.” “I’m not qualified.” “I ate chicken last night.”

And our excuses are almost always… well, pretty darn lame.

But sometimes they’re also not lame and that’s fine too.

If doing something really is a bad idea then you’ll figure that out when you ask “why not?”.

That’s the brilliance of the question, really. It’s just waiting for you to look your choices in the eye. It doesn’t have any sort of an agenda.

Jessica Ruprecht