Pushing Through Pain: Reexamining Your Relationship with Discomfort

"Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life." ~ Susan David

Are you someone who struggles with discomfort and finding the "right" way to deal with it? Many of us have been taught to stay in discomfort and push through it, but is that always the best approach, especially if the only other option is to distract ourselves?

In this blog post, I share a personal experience where I grappled with these questions. By examining my own strategies for dealing with discomfort, I gained valuable insights into my relationship with my body and learned when it's time to listen to my own needs. If you're curious about how you can navigate discomfort in a more mindful and compassionate way, keep reading.

I was on a one-day meditation and writing retreat recently. In one of the longer meditations, as I was meditating, my legs started to fall asleep. As they got more and more numb, the pain and discomfort grew in intensity, and I found my process of dealing with this discomfort fascinating to watch.

The question of whether to stay in the discomfort or move arose in me. I've always been taught in meditation to keep movement to a minimum and stay with a sensation as much as possible, so I tried to sit still even though my legs were burning.

As I sat, I noticed all my little strategies kicking in about how I deal with discomfort. My first go-to is to fidget and be busy doing something else so I don't have to feel it. My fingers started to twitch. I suddenly noticed an itch. There were all these little micro-movements to try to distract myself from the sensations in my legs.

When that didn't work, I opted for my second strategy, which is to grit my teeth and sit there for as long as possible because that's the "right" thing to do. Of course, wherever I go, there I am so it was an eye-opener to notice how this strategy shows up in other areas of my life.

A short aside: I noticed that, even though my legs were numb, I was still feeling a lot of sensation. As someone who can have a hard time accessing my emotions, even now, I found this a really interesting observation. Even numbness is rich in data if I pay attention. So rather than discounting numbness as the absence of feeling, I'm getting more curious about the flavour of that "nothingness" an it's proving to be a powerful way into the layers of my experience - because there's always something going on, even if I initially feel numb.

Finally, after what felt like an age, I decided to move and experiment with what would happen. The rush of sensation and the sweet, painful relief when the feeling came back in my legs almost made me wish I stayed still - an analogy for my healing process of learning to feel more!

This experience left me with a question of what the "right" way is to deal with discomfort. Should I stay in it and potentially learn from it, or should I move? For me, watching my strategies play out was enlightening, and it was like a little hologram of how I deal with discomfort in my life.

You can see the upset written all over my face here but I kept pushing through because that what I had been told to do.

There came a point where I realised I was suffering needlessly because somebody else had told me that staying with discomfort was the right way to do things. It made me question why I was prioritising external authority over what my body was telling me, which was that it really hurt.

This inquiry has left me curious about my relationship with discomfort and the strategies I use to deal with it. Where do I override my own sensations to follow external authority? Where do I check out early and run back to my comfort zone? And where do I learn from discomfort, and when is the point where staying in discomfort no longer serves me?

I don't have a definitive answer to this inquiry. Staying with sensations and discomfort is of value. To a point. When my perfectionism starts to kick in to deal with it, staying with discomfort becomes self-brutalising. Perhaps the answer, as it so often is, starts with awareness. The more I notice my patterns, and when I've practised other strategies, I have a choice. To stay, to move or maybe some kind of third way.

I would love to hear how this shows up for you. What are your patterns in discomfort? Where do you check out early, where do you stay far past the point of it being useful because someone told you it was the right thing to do, and where do you learn from it? Please comment below, and I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for joining me!