Now Exiting Your Comfort Zone.
Monday, May 25, 2009 at 4:35PM “Please take a moment to look around and see if you can even remember what your belongings look like, and if you’ve wedged them into the seat pocket in front of you, go ahead and leave them there, because they’re of no use to you right now. When opening the overhead compartment (your brain) please use caution as contents will undoubtedly have moved around so much that while you may still recognize them, you will no longer recall the words to describe them.”
I’m deep in a teacher training right now (Yoga Tune Up with Jill Miller. Amazing. Find her and study) and it feels like someone zoomed up in a van with blacked out windows and snatched me off the street, blindfolded me, drove around for hours, and then dumped me in a dark alley.
That sounds horrible. It’s really not like that at all. (And I adore Jill!) All of us trainees are having an incredible learning and growing experience, and laughing and enjoying ourselves and making mistakes, but it is a galaxy far, far away from my comfort zone. It’s the kind of learning curve that makes me question what the hell I’ve been kidding myself with teaching all these years.
When we get flung out of our habits, our regular patterns of living, working, teaching – even out of the words we’re used to saying – the unfamiliarity can be overwhelming. But it's not supposed to be comfortable – we’re leaving our comfort zone, remember? We seem to always have a last-ditch hope that something will be familiar, that we’ll recognize where we are, or see someone we know that we can grab onto, but it ain’t gonna happen. Best case scenario (like the one I’m in right now) there are a whole bunch of other people there with you who also don’t know what the hell is going on and you get to sympathize with each other.
So we have a choice in how we react to this new arrangement of molecules and atoms. The first choice is to resist it, curl up in a ball, kick and scream and declare that we HATE it, and that we’re LEAVING, and we always thought it was STUPID anyway. This is our brain-based fear telling us that this unfamiliar place is too dangerous and we might not survive. But when we run away from the unfamiliar, we merely feed our fear; we cement its place in our lives and in our hearts. It moves in and starts rearranging the furniture, and like a bad houseguest, takes an enormous amount of effort to kick to the curb.
Our other choice is to sit in that discomfort. White-knuckle it like an addict getting clean, if necessary (it can feel that intense!). Wiggle around a little. Feel it out. Breathe. Wait. The longer we can manage ourselves in relation to the discomfort and fear, the less uncomfortable and scary it becomes, and the more we can release that grip, a knuckle at a time. (A friend of mine used to have a book on her shelf called “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway.” I never read the book, but that title gave me a lot!)
Until after a while we realize that yes, everything is new, and no, we’re not going to know what’s happening for a while, but that’s not a bad thing. And this newness might actually stimulate the heck out of us (and neurologically speaking, that’s exactly what’s going on – we are forced to build new pathways in the brain for these new experiences) and inspire new creativity within us in all different aspects of our lives. It might inspire us to make long-needed changes that we’ve been avoiding, or have that conversation that we really should have had six months ago, or leave the job that’s sucking at our soul, or the relationship that is safe but miserable.
Through all this, we can drop through the fear created by the mind and rest in the safety and the constancy of our hearts. We can rely on the deep knowing that even when the world turns upside down, there is a stillness and a truth at our centers, and that truth will light the way through. And we can even attempt the advanced variation of this life pose – to revel in the not knowing.
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you’re perfectly free.
-Rumi (From The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)
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