Embrace Discomfort Quotes

The momentary discomfort was nothing at all compared to the realisation that she was finding refuge in my flawed embrace.

This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.

Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. And so our imaginations and deep social connections went with it.

We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.

In newness we are forced into presence and focus. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids.

Ask any SF guy: Doing physically hard things is an enormous life hack. Do hard things and the rest of life gets easier and you appreciate it all the more,

Better to embrace the discomfort of being different than the comfort of fitting in.

Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

The momentary discomfort was nothing at all compared to the realization that she was finding refuge in my flawed embrace.

But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.

For many of us, our first response to vulnerability and pain of these sharp points is not to lean into the discomfort and feel our way through but rather to make it go away.

The most powerful emotions that we experience have very sharp points, like the tip of a thorn. When they prick us, they cause discomfort and even pain. Just the anticipation or fear of these feelings can trigger intolerable vulnerability in us. We know it’s coming. For many of us, our first response to vulnerability and pain of these sharp points is not to lean into the discomfort and feel our way through but rather to make it go away. We do that by numbing and taking the edge off the pain with whatever provides the quickest relief. We can anesthetize with a whole bunch of stuff, including alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, money, work, caretaking, gambling, staying busy, affairs, chaos, shopping, planning, perfectionism, constant change, and the Internet.

People are then spurred to do something about their boredom. “Tolstoy had this great quote in Anna Karenina that says boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’ ” said Danckert. “So boredom is a motivational state.

Western laziness.” It consists of “cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues….If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called ‘responsibilities’ accumulate to fill them up….Going on as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself and a pointless distraction.

Fear is apparently a mindset often felt prior to experience

Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.

Open yourself to discomfort. Meet it with mercy, not fear. Recognize that when our pain most calls for our embrace, we are often the least present. Soften, enter, and explore, and continue softening to make room for your life.

Now I can lean into joy, even when it makes me feel tender and vulnerable. In fact, I expect tender and vulnerable. Joy is as thorny and sharp as any of the dark emotions. To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees—these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. In fact, addiction research shows us that an intensely positive experience is as likely to cause relapse as an intensely painful experience.

as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.

nothing great in life comes with complete assurance of success.

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

Embrace short-term discomfort to find a long-term benefit.

The reality however is that in order to make progress in life, we have to embrace discomfort.

This creep phenomenon applies directly to how we now relate to comfort, said Levari. Call it comfort creep. When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable.

The second great change in human fitness began around 1850. It marked the start of the Industrial Revolution, and today just 13.7 percent of jobs require the same heavy work as our past days of farming.

I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude, and grace. I’m also learning that the uncomfortable and scary leaning requires both spirit and resilience.

But there are a lot of great pleasures you can get out of the experience of being alone with yourself,” said Bowker. In solitude you can find the unfiltered version of you. People often have breakthroughs where they tap into how they truly feel about a topic and come to some new understanding about themselves, said Bowker. Then you can take your realizations out into the social world, he added: “Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.” Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness.

From this foundation of spirituality, three other significant patterns emerged as being essential to resilience: Cultivating hope Practicing critical awareness Letting go of numbing and taking the edge off vulnerability, discomfort, and pain

Roughly three-quarters of jobs are now sedentary, and we’re sitting more every year. Over the last decade, the average American added another hour of daily sitting. Adults now sit for six and a half hours, while kids sit more than eight (the removal of recess hasn’t helped, either).

Teddy Roosevelt put it this way: “Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation—these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness;…life is hard and cruel for all the lower creatures, and for man also in what the sentimentalists call a ‘state of nature.’ ” The state humans lived in for all but the most recent fragment of time.

You act like life is fulfilling a checklist. ‘I need to get a good wife or husband, then I get a good car, then I get a good house, then I get a promotion, then I get a better car and a better house and I make a name for myself and then…’ ” He rattled off more accomplishments that fulfill the American Dream. “But this plan will never materialize perfectly. And even if it does, then what? You don’t settle, you add more items to the checklist. It is the nature of desire to get one thing and immediately want the next thing, and this cycle of accomplishment and acquisitions won’t necessarily make you happy—if you have ten pairs of shoes you want eleven pairs.

According to scientists at the University of Oregon, people who exercised in a 100-degree room for ten days, for example, increased their fitness performance markers significantly more than a group who did the exact same workout in an air-conditioned room. The hot exercise caused “inexplicable changes to the heart’s left ventricle.” This can improve the heart’s health and efficiency. Hot exercise also activates “heat shock proteins” and “BDNF.” The former are inflammation fighters linked to living longer, while the latter is a chemical that promotes the survival and growth of neurons. BDNF might be protective against depression and Alzheimer’s, according to the NIH.

I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know

It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

We live in a state of constant mental churn and meaningless chatter.

Maybe when I get home, instead of thinking the oft-repeated “less phone,” it might be more productive to think “more boredom.

Most Americans are unaware of how good you have it, and so, many of you are miserable and chasing the wrong things,” he said.

Kashey indeed has no food ideology. “I don’t care what people eat,” he said. “Just so long as they keep track of it.” Consistently leveraging the Hawthorne effect.

The body’s “taking out the trash” process is officially called autophagy, which translates from ancient Greek as “self-devouring.

But our 15-hour daily eating windows disrupt the process, said Panda. They rob our bodies of the 12 to 16 hours we need to fully metabolize food and lapse into autophagy mode.

If you eat…before bed, you’re not going to have any autophagy. That means you’re not going to take out the trash, so the cells begin to accumulate more and more debris.

Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness.

I’d experienced firsthand the phenomenon first theorized by William James and proven by recent studies, which shows that new events decelerate our perception of time.

Populations in Asia and the Middle East who rest and do many activities in the squatting position, for example, see little to no hip and lower-back issues.

Except not all germs or microorganisms are bad. The vast, vast majority are benign and many are beneficial.

Food allergies disproportionately affect people in the most sanitary nations.

I like the simple definition of addiction being ‘continued use despite adverse consequences,’ ” said Brewer.

Studies show that even dirt-poor people who live in rural China report being happier than infinitely wealthier Chinese city-dwellers.

The problem—and the foundation of our persistent suffering—is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth.

Every other food we eat lies between these two foods. Junk food such as chips, candy bars, desserts, and even energy bars, for example, have about 2,000 calories per pound. Processed grains like breads and crackers have about 1,500, while unprocessed grains like cooked rice and oats have 500. Tubers, fruits, and vegetables have about 400, 300, and 120, respectively.

Modern humans may have an unmet need to do what’s truly difficult for us. New research shows that depression, anxiety, and feeling like you don’t belong can be linked to being untested.

the data shows that the majority of us are living a greater proportion of our years in ill health, propped up by medications and machines. Life span might be up. But health span is down.

Sorkin’s takeaway is that we should learn to deal with boredom, and then discover ways to overcome it that are more productive and creative than watching a YouTube video or scrolling through Instagram.

The least filling food was croissants, while the most filling was plain white potatoes. The USDA reports that a small croissant and a medium potato both have about 170 calories. This study suggests you’d have to eat about seven croissants, 1,190 calories, to experience the same fullness you’d get from a single potato. The key quality that made a food filling: how heavy its 240-calorie serving size was.

Unfortunately, there’s no pill that can alter our gut microbiomes to be more Hadza-like. “Because they take in microbes from food they pull from the dirt, as well as air and land,” said Schnorr. “You really need continuous exposure to outside microbes.” University of Chicago microbiome scientists have in fact declared that “dirt is good.” The more time a person spends outside getting down and dirty in it, the better.

Other research shows antianxiety medication use rises a relative 28 percent for every 10-decibel increase a neighborhood experiences, and people who live near loud roads are 25 percent more likely to be depressed.

The notion that cities depress us is backed by numbers. People who live in cities are 21 percent more likely to suffer from anxiety and 39 percent more likely to suffer from depression than people who live in rural areas.

Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.

The Tsimane people, a tribe in Bolivia, eat rice, plantains, tubers, and corn; meat and fish that they themselves hunt and pull from streams; fruit; and the occasional wild nuts. They register the healthiest hearts ever recorded, according to a global team of scientists.

In a lot of cases, someone else’s actions really do contribute to our discomfort and unhappiness. I’m not suggesting that we should be okay with behavior that is hurtful or destructive. But we remain victims as long as we hold another person responsible for our own well-being.

At the signing of the Declaration of Independence only 5 percent of us were urbanites. By 1876, that number was still just 25 percent. But roughly 100 years ago we tipped to favor city living. Today, 84 percent of Americans live in cities and more are moving in. It’s an odd trend.

We will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won't always get what we want. That is part of being human. The problem - and the foundation of our persistent suffering - is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signal something about our worth.

Leadership expert Michael Hyatt reflected on Karnazes’s life and drew three conclusions about why we should embrace discomfort: 1. Comfort is overrated. It doesn’t lead to happiness. It makes us lazy—and forgetful. It often leads to self-absorption, boredom, and discontent. 2. Discomfort can be a catalyst for growth. It makes us yearn for something more. It forces us to change, stretch, and adapt. 3. Discomfort is often a sign we’re making progress. You’ve heard the expression, “no pain, no gain.” It’s true! When you push yourself to grow, you will experience discomfort.

So, for example, at one end of the spectrum there’s something like iceberg lettuce. There are sixty calories in a pound of iceberg lettuce. At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum there are oils, like olive oil or canola oil. A pound of oil has four thousand calories,” Kashey explained.

Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

But when you understand that nothing is permanent you cannot help but follow a better, happier path,” he said. “It calms your mind. You tend not to get overly excited, angry, or critical. With this principle people interact with others and it improves their relationships. They become more grateful and gratuitous. Because they

And now we’ve killed off one of the main drivers of creativity: mind-wandering. The result? A researcher at the University of William and Mary analyzed 300,000 Torrance Test scores since the 1950s. She found that the creativity scores began to nosedive in 1990, leading her to conclude that we’re now facing a “creativity crisis.

the Yale Cancer Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Massachusetts General Hospital supports this notion. It found that dying patients who had open conversations about their death experienced a better quality of life in the weeks and months leading to their passing, as judged by their family members and nurse practitioners.

Harvard Medical School surgery professor and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant Dr. Atul Gawande notes that 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients in their final year of life. Most of that money goes to treatments that are of little lifesaving benefit and often just put the person through more unnecessary suffering.

The human population density of the world when we lived in hunter-gatherer communities was about 1 person for every 6 square miles. Compare that to Manhattan, which jams about 417,000 people into the same 6-square-mile space. Even midsize cities like Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Oregon, have 58,000 and 26,000 people per 6 square miles, respectively.

Boredom is indeed dead. And one scientist way up north in Ontario, Canada, is discovering that this is bad. A type of bad that’s infected us all. He believes that our collective lack of boredom is not only burning us out and leading to some ill mental health effects, but also muting what boredom is trying to tell us about our mind, emotions, ideas, wants, and needs.

I understand that this work is demanding, complicated, and exhausting, but I also know that there is no better feeling than to see yourself and the world as they really are. When you have an awakening, the dance of discomfort in cross-cultural relationships begins to dissipate. You begin to shake the fear of truly being seen, and you learn to embrace not only your strengths but your humanness.

It’s important to preserve this precious understanding of mitakpa in your mind. It will significantly contribute to your happiness,” said the lama. He echoed the khenpo’s sentiment, explaining that ignoring mitakpa often leads a person to believe that “things will be better when I do x.” A false sense of permanence can cause a person to put off the things they truly want to do, thinking, “I can do that when I retire.

The World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute of Cancer Research (WCRF/AICR) has spent three decades analyzing all the data on cancer prevention. They release a massive report each decade, and their most recent one stated that “cancer is a multifactorial disease that is fueled by a deranged metabolism.” Which is why they concluded that being at a healthy weight was the number-one thing a person could do to prevent cancer.

Heart disease is the Jeffrey Dahmer of modern ailments. It kills more than 25 percent of us. That’s one person in the United States dying of it every 37 seconds. Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.

The number they tabulated was food that has about five hundred sixty-seven calories per pound. The exactitude of the number is meaningless. But the practical takeaway is important: A person should mostly be eating unprocessed whole grains*7 and tubers, fruits and vegetables, and lowish-fat animal protein.” These foods lead us to the sweet spot where we find a healthy weight and keep meal satisfaction high, he said. “An average plate could be a quarter animal protein, a quarter whole grains or tubers, and half vegetables or fruit.

It was after a Frontline television documentary screened in the US in 1995 that the Freyds' public profile as aggrieved parents provoked another rupture within the Freyd family, when William Freyd made public his own discomfort. 'Peter Freyd is my brother, Pamela Freyd is both my stepsister and sister-in-law,' he explained. Peter and Pamela had grown up together as step-siblings. 'There is no doubt in my mind that there was severe abuse in the home of Peter and Pam, while they were raising their daughters,' he wrote. He challenged Peter Freyd's claims that he had been misunderstood, that he merely had a 'ribald' sense of humour. 'Those of us who had to endure it, remember it as abusive at best and viciously sadistic at worst.' He added that, in his view, 'The False memory Syndrome Foundation is designed to deny a reality that Peter and Pam have spent most of their lives trying to escape.' He felt that there is no such thing as a false memory syndrome.' Criticising the media for its uncritical embrace of the Freyds' campaign, he cautioned: That the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has been able to excite so much media attention has been a great surprise to those of us who would like to admire and respect the objectivity and motive of people in the media. Neither Peter's mother nor his daughters, nor I have wanted anything to do with Peter and Pam for periods of time ranging up to two decades. We do not understand why you would 'buy' into such an obviously flawed story. But buy it you did, based on the severely biased presentation of the memory issue that Peter and Pam created to deny their own difficult reality. p14-14 Stolen Voices: An Exposure of the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

I would always snack because I thought I was starving all the time. Kashey taught me that hunger can be deceptive. I learned I often just had a psychological need to eat. He taught me that it’s okay to be hungry. My response was ‘WHAT???’ He told me to ‘embrace the suck.’ Now, yeah, I’m hungry sometimes. It is what it is. I’m OK with being uncomfortable now. I remind myself that I’m safe, have food, and will eat when it’s time to eat.” She’s down about 150 pounds and still losing. “I swim, lift weights, hike, walk miles at a time, and am off my medications,” said Bunge.

Second letter: Embrace your fear What holds us back in life is the invisible architecture of fear. It keeps us in our comfort zones, which are, in truth, the least safe place in which to live. Indeed the greatest risk in life is taking no risk. But every time we do that which we fear , we take back the power that fear has stolen from us - for on the other side of fear lives our strength. Every time we step into the discomfort of growth and progress, we become more free. The more fears we walk through, the more power we reclaim. In this way, we grow both fearless and powerful, and thus are able to live the lives of our dreams.

The modern comforts and conveniences that now most influence our daily experience—cars, computers, television, climate control, smartphones, ultraprocessed food, and more—have been used by our species for about 100 years or less. That’s around 0.03 percent of the time we’ve walked the earth. Include all the Homos—habilis, erectus, heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, and us—and open the time scale to 2.5 million years and the figure drops to 0.004 percent. Constant comfort is a radically new thing for us humans. Over these 2.5 million years, our ancestors’ lives were intimately intertwined with discomfort. These people were constantly exposed to the elements. It was either too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, or too snowy out. The only escape from the weather was a rudimentary

But this recalibration, this heightening of our lowest levels of perception, leaves us calmer and less anxious. It scrubs the brain of the stress-inducing noise we live in, according to Orfield. “People go into the chamber and come out saying things like ‘My brain hasn’t felt this good in years,’ ” he said. “We had someone who was on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. He could still hear the planes taking off. He went into the chamber and afterward the noise was gone. It had reset his hearing back to zero.” Orfield’s anechoic chamber has since been named the quietest place on earth by Guinness World Records. Extreme quiet is a promising treatment for people who’ve gone through trauma, particularly vets suffering from PTSD. When he retires, Orfield plans to flip his lab into a nonprofit that will be used for therapy and research. It’s probably not feasible to lounge in Orfield’s lab.

The Buddha taught many techniques to help us calm our body and mind and look deeply at them. They can be summarized in five stages: (1) Recognition — If we are angry, we say, "I know that anger is in me." (2) Acceptance — When we are angry, we do not deny it. We accept what is present. (3) Embracing — We hold our anger in our two arms like a mother holding her crying baby. Our mindfulness embraces our emotion, and this alone can calm our anger and ourselves. (4) Looking deeply — When we are calm enough, we can look deeply to understand what has brought this anger to be, what is causing our baby's discomfort. (5) Insight — The fruit of looking deeply is understanding the many causes and conditions, primary and secondary, that have brought about our anger, that are causing our baby to cry. Perhaps our baby is hungry. Perhaps his diaper pin is piercing his skin. Our anger was triggered when our friend spoke to us meanly, and suddenly we remember that he was not at his best today because his father is dying. We reflect like this until we have some insights into what has caused our suffering. With insight, we know what to do and what not to do to change the situation.

4Paul Gaydos My Books Browse ▾ Community ▾ The Way of the Superior Man Quotes The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to... by David Deida Read Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it. Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering. By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

55. The Risk: Reward Ratio In mountaineering, climbers become very familiar with the ‘risk: reward ratio’. There are always crunch times on a mountain when you have to weigh up the odds for success against the risks of cold, bad weather or avalanche. But in essence the choice is simple - you cannot reach the big summits if you do not accept the big risks. If you risk nothing, you gain nothing. The great climbers know that great summits don’t come easy - they require huge, concerted, continuous effort. But mountains reward real effort. So does life and business. Everything that is worthwhile requires risk and effort. If it was easy, then everyone would succeed. Having a big goal is the easy bit. The part that separates the many from the few is how willing you are to go through the pain. How able you are to hold on and to keep going when it is tough? The French Foreign Legion, with whom I once did simulated basic training in the deserts of North Africa, describe what it takes to earn the coveted cap, the képi blanc cap: ‘A thousand barrels of sweat.’ That is a lot of sweat! Trust me. But ask any Legionnaire if it was worth it and I can tell you their answer. Every time. Because the pain and the discomfort, the blisters and the aching muscles, don’t last for ever. But the pride in an achievement reached or dream attained will be with you for the rest of your days. The greater the effort, the better the reward. So learn to embrace hard work and great effort and risk. Without them, there can be no meaningful achievement.

But here’s the tricky part about compassion and connecting: We can’t call just anyone. It’s not that simple. I have a lot of good friends, but there are only a handful of people whom I can count on to practice compassion when I’m in the dark shame place. If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become one more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm. We want solid connection in a situation like this—something akin to a sturdy tree firmly planted in the ground. We definitely want to avoid the following: The friend who hears the story and actually feels shame for you. She gasps and confirms how horrified you should be. Then there is awkward silence. Then you have to make her feel better. The friend who responds with sympathy (I feel so sorry for you) rather than empathy (I get it, I feel with you, and I’ve been there). If you want to see a shame cyclone turn deadly, throw one of these at it: “Oh, you poor thing.” Or, the incredibly passive-aggressive southern version of sympathy: “Bless your heart.” The friend who needs you to be the pillar of worthiness and authenticity. She can’t help because she’s too disappointed in your imperfections. You’ve let her down. The friend who is so uncomfortable with vulnerability that she scolds you: “How did you let this happen? What were you thinking?” Or she looks for someone to blame: “Who was that guy? We’ll kick his ass.” The friend who is all about making it better and, out of her own discomfort, refuses to acknowledge that you can actually be crazy and make terrible choices: “You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. You rock. You’re perfect. Everyone loves you.” The friend who confuses “connection” with the opportunity to one-up you: “That’s nothing. Listen to what happened to me one time!

To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees—these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy.

So what’s the secret to overcoming discomfort? It’s actually dead simple: enjoy it. That’s right — start enjoying the discomfort. Reframe it in your head. Tell yourself that you’re a badass, pushing through this awful feeling to get what you want and deserve. Embrace the suck. Embrace it big-time. Tell yourself that everything you’ve ever wanted, everything that’s worth working for, can only be found outside your comfort zone. Take pride in choosing to feel discomfort. In getting up before sunrise, when the last thing you want to do is leave your warm, comfy bed and go outside in the cold, dark rain. Take pride in DOing the thing even though you’re a beginner — in facing head-on that fear of looking stupid. That fear is just your mind chattering; it means nothing unless you grab hold of it and let it define and defeat you.

Lean into the discomfort. To my diversity brain, the phrase means to embrace what is difficult so that you may progress. Welcome what makes you frightened and what makes your heart rate rise. Greet that sense of uncertainty into your life so that you may explore yourself more deeply.

I knew this was a critically important finding in my research, so I spent several hundred interviews trying to better understand the consequences of numbing and how taking the edge off behaviors is related to addiction. Here’s what I learned: Most of us engage in behaviors (consciously or not) that help us to numb and take the edge of off vulnerability, pain, and discomfort. Addiction can be described as chronically and compulsively numbing and taking the edge off of feelings. We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. In fact, addiction research shows us that an intensely positive experience is as likely to cause relapse as an intensely painful experience.

You will wage battle against the need for certainty and the discomfort of uncertainty.

Leaning into the discomfort of uncertainty is the path to growth. When you step into uncertainty, you expose yourself to the new, which is often the difficult, yet always the most vital choice you’ll make toward personal betterment.

Could you really be expected to..." she paused, searching for the word. "Pleasure?" He offered, amiably. "Entertain. All three of them?" He began dealing the cards again. "Yes." "How?" He looked up at her, and offered her a wolfish grin. "Would you really like me to answer that?" Her eyes widened. "Uhm... no." He laughed then, a deep, rumbling laugh unlike anything she'd ever heard from him, and she was stunned by the way it transformed him. His face was immediately lighter, his eyes brighter, his frame more relaxed. She couldn't help but smile back at him, even as she admonished, "You're enjoying my discomfort." "Indeed I am, Empress." She blushed. "You shouldn't call me that." "Why not? You were named for an empress, were you not?" She closed her eyes and gave a mock shudder. "I prefer not to be reminded of the hideous name." "You should embrace it," he said, forthrightly. "You're one of the few women I've met who could live up to such a name." "You've said that before," she said. He turned a curious look on her. "I have?" She met his eyes and immediately regretted bringing up the decade-old memory, so insignificant to him- so very meaningful to her.

When we suppress our thoughts and feelings, they often come out in forms that cause grief and discomfort.

The mission also has to be treated with urgency. There is a saying in sales that “time kills all deals.” Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants. The faster we separate from the competition, the more likely we are to succeed. Urgency is a mindset that can be learned if it doesn't come to you naturally. You can embrace the discomfort that comes with moving faster instead of avoiding it.

Key Points: There are situations in life and external factors that simply cannot be changed or avoided. You must accept temporary discomfort. Embrace these challenges and take comfort in knowing that many have been deterred, whilst you remain resilient and productive.

From this foundation of spirituality, three other significant patterns emerged as being essential to resilience: 1. Cultivating hope 2. Practicing critical awareness 3. Letting go of numbing and taking the edge off vulnerability, discomfort, and pain

IF I HAD KNOWN "If I had known" would be the words of a man who is ungrateful to God for him being called to serve. But in tears, I try to smile. The overwhelming need to be there for everyone. The spiritual battles and revelation with dreadful confrontation each day. Yet we are called unwise and drafted as weak. The misunderstanding by those you weep for day and night. Our discomfort to make them sleep peacefully. The fear that grips me when they say, “Leader hear my dreams. See what I saw…” and I am put into another frantic panic. My earnest prayers are to comfort those in pain, enrich those in poverty, forgive those in sin, and save those who need saving even if my life could be traded because I swore to save one soul even if it's the last thing done. The nights that require cuddles but embrace books, prayers, and constant confrontation with the wicked world. We do not even enjoy the world we live in but constantly seek to right the wrong made in the spiritual because we are set to be violent only which we can conquer. Sometimes, I say “If I had known”. But I am not ashamed of my shortcomings; even those before me had the same. Some said “if only you can take this cup away…”, some were afflicted with an incurable sickness, some were driven from their father’s land and they sort solace in Medina. Some were crucified, others tried by ordeal or burnt at the stake. Our family is far though they are close because we swore to keep those who follow our God as our brothers and sisters and love them as we love ourselves. The job of doing God’s work to me is to kill the flesh so that we can rise to glory. My flesh Oh Lord is ever before thee but be mild with it so I can enjoy the bounty of this life and the hereafter. Amen

Preventing kids from exploring their edges is largely thought to be the cause of the abnormally high and growing rates of anxiety and depression in young people.

not about physical accomplishment,” said Parrish. “It asks, ‘What are you mentally and spiritually willing to put yourself through to be a better human?