"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says different is selling something."*

Many of us spend most of our time trying in one way or another to avoid pain. This seemingly instinctive pain-avoiding reaction to life is called dvesha, and it is one of the 5 obstacles, or kleshas, that Patanjali lists in the Yoga Sutra. Interestingly, this aversion to discomfort, and our pain-avoiding habits that it dictates, is actually considered an obstacle to happiness.

Pain tells us that we are alive. It brings us out of hiding and makes us experience the immediate moment. How we react to pain, then, dictates how much more pain we create for ourselves. In a yoga pose, squeezing up the face, holding the breath, even grunting sends messages to the body and to the nervous system that suffering is taking place. Sometimes these are unavoidable, but sometimes they’re just adding drama to the situation. I took a class once with a student behind me making the most outrageous grunts, moans, and cries that you could imagine. Each new pose brought on a new series of noises. At first it was funny and I giggled along with the rest of the students, but after he kept yelling and moaning I started to get irritated and had to work hard to ignore it and focus on what I was doing. I can’t even imagine how distracting the sounds must have been for his own practice.

This isn’t a tract on silent practice, and Lord knows there have been and will be plenty of times when a pose makes me yell, but yoga practice is always an interesting window to our reaction to pain both on the mat and in our lives.

If we want transformation, if we want change, if we want to free ourselves from physical and mental discomfort, we have to go into the pain to get there. There is no quick-fix, late night TV infomercial $9.99 Oxy-clean solution.

So the question then becomes, how much do you want it? My teacher Manorama often uses the example of the smoker who is constantly telling other people “I want to quit smoking,” and yet continues to smoke. That person doesn’t really want to quit smoking yet; they want to want to quit smoking. And for us it is the same: until that desire for change gets into our every bone, we will resist it, even as we may claim otherwise. 

And so for most of us that means that we are given a particular lesson over and over again until we reach the point that we don’t want to have to go through it again. That lesson can play out as the same kind of romantic relationships, or the same kind of friendships, or the same kind of boss, or the same money troubles, or whatever our personal lesson is, until we finally have that aha moment of realizing that the one constant in all of these repeating situations is us. So it becomes part of the practice of our lives to make that change. (MJ RIP)

And change is uncomfortable – we’re programmed to want things to stay the same, even if that thing isn’t working! We don’t like things to be different, or even slightly uncomfortable, let alone to actually hurt. But until we can take an honest look at ourselves and recognize that this something is keeping us in some way small or unhappy, we will repeat the lesson over, and over, and over again.

So maybe this manifests as a pose that you hate, or that scares you. Maybe every time in class when the teacher calls for this pose, you find yourself having the same reaction, reinforcing the fear or the dislike. Maybe next time it happens you can catch yourself in the moment and turn it around. Decide that even though the pose scares you, you’re going to really try it instead of staying in your safe zone. Maybe it’s just going to a yoga class at all, or any other kind of physical activity that you associate with discomfort. What you will discover is that after a while, you can differentiate for yourself the kind of pain, the fire, that brings change, and purposefully step into that fire. In Sanskrit the word is tapas; it means hard work, and determination, and intentionally living with a degree of discipline that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other along our path.

YS II.8 duhkhanusayi dvesah

Aversion is that which follows identification with painful experiences.

(translation by Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

* from The Princess Bride (1987)

Now Exiting Your Comfort Zone.

“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)