living in a comfort zone or a comfort trap?
I never knew how comfortable I was until I moved to Central Africa. That place is UNCOMFORTABLE. Especially when you’re hanging around the local areas…
Picture this:
* An overloaded car with four of us squeezed in the backseat of a car driving on a dusty bumpy road for four hours with music club hip hop blaring from a shitty speaker. Oh, and we’re all sweating cos it’s a humid 35 degrees.
* Tropical heat that sticks to your skin and you gotta walk from here to there with your heavy bag…
* The water is turned off for 5 months and you have to call the water-filling guy, wait for him to come (he works on African time, of course), fill the tank, then arrange your sons to fill 30 10L bottles and we all carry them up to the house. Do this once a week just to flush the toilet.
😅
After these experiences I realised how comfortable we are in the West.
Comfort is wonderful. It’s part of our genius in the West: we thought again and again, how can I innovate this to be more comfortable?
This chair
This mobile
This knife
This fabric
This computer
These socks
The flight
We made comfort into an art.
And it’s such an animal tendency to move toward comfort, to move towards what feels good…
Like a cat, we’d wander over to the sunny spot on the soft rug rather than stay on the cold concrete floor.
It’s natural to avoid discomfort and move toward what feels nice.
Though while it’s soooo gooood to have running hot water and a soft chair for your lovely bottom, there are some dangerous things about comfort that can be deadly for your soul…
4 Reasons why comfort can be a trap
1. Comfort can put you to sleep.
Think about it: when you go to sleep, you lie on a soft mattress and pull a cozy cover of you. You max out the comfy dial and it helps you to fall unconscious. We do this in our waking lives as we max out the comfy dial (air con, ergonomic office chair, surface-level conversations that never get deep, online grocery orders, Uber Eats, Bumble to meet people), becoming nicely comatose even when we are so busy.
Being comatose means we forget that there is something else calling… We get so locked into what we see in front of our face that we never look up, never look within.
2. Comfort can mean inertia in your life.
If it’s not broken, why fix it? If it’s quite fine, why change anything? Comfort means things are wonderfully nice, or perhaps just okay, and that feels reasonable to keep it just as it is. So nothing ever changes. Everything stays just the same…
3. Comfort can trap you in a golden cage.
These things that are comfortable often cost money or time. You become so dedicated to enjoying the comfortable things you need to keep earning or investing your time in order to keep them (even if you hate your job or relationship). It’s comfortable. So you do what you need to do to keep it. Daily.
4. Comfort can hook you so you never grow and know your power and resilience.
Because comfort means you’re rarely meeting discomfort, you forget how powerful and resilient you are. You become the princess complaining about the pea under your organic bamboo mattress made by well-embursed widows from Peru.
In the West, we aren’t living in a comfort zone, we’re living in a comfort trap.
But the thing is, even though you have an exceptionally well-curated home with all the lovely paraphernalia, you can still be unhappy.
The discomfort can find you from the inside!
din-din-dinnnnnn
What?
But I thought that my white carpet, iPhone 213 and Egyptian sheets by Kim K means I would feel good…
How is it I have everything but a part of me still feels miserable?
1. Stuff won’t save you from feeling all the feelings.
2. Life will always include pain and pleasure. That’s divine law.
3. Chances are that there is a radio station in your head that might not be tuned to your highest and deepest wisdom. That radio station causes pain (the main DJ is the ego (who really believes you’re not okay)).
All the feelings that are underneath the comfortable *things* are here to be felt. That’s how they get digested: when you let yourself feel them. They need your attention and to return to your Self, not just your thousand thread-count sheets.
So, these feelings in fact end up becoming the source of our discomfort in the West.
This discomfort is something to lean into because discomfort is a wonderful ally to your power. Here’s why:
3 Reasons why dIScomfort can be an ally to your power: lean in
1. Discomfort can make you alert.
When there’s discomfort, you become aware. You can’t sleep when you find a treebranch in your bed. It wakes you up. It makes you sensitive and participate in what’s happening now. When you’re aware you’re power-full.
Use your pain to wake up.
2. Discomfort can propel you into ACTION, break inertia and do something new.
When you have a stone in your shoe, you do something to get it out. When you notice a weird smell in the air, you get off your ass and open the window. Discomfort means we stop with the same old same old and we do something new. We become active and creative. When you’re creative and active, you’re power-full.
Use your pain to wake up.
3. Discomfort can make you stronger — you become resilient enough to overcome ANYTHING.
Do you think a warrior is afraid of discomfort? They are walking through the mud and rain with a leg injury and they keep going. They know their strength and they don’t let things stop them. They get shit done.
Your discomfort helps you to become strong enough to rise above it and keep going. Then, other things will come up in your life and you’ll be strong enough to meet them, not fold. This way you get bigger and bigger and meet bigger and bigger things on the way. You become power-full.
Use your pain to wake up.
it’s all about balance…
Comfort is great, but can be a trap. Discomfort is not exactly pleasant, but can be em-powering.
Neither are great in excess. Nature (God’s divine law) is all about balance. There is a time for comfort and a time for discomfort. There is a time for pushing your edges and feeling your stretch and there’s a time for resting. In breath, out breath.
So lean into what is uncomfortable… It might be good for you! And if something’s feeling out of balance, invite in the other pole…
If you’re interested in getting bones of steel so nothing can ever break you or want to resolve some long-standing knots in your mind, relationships or sense of purpose, join me for Bwiti Initiation in Gabon, Africa.
This is a one-week process lead by consecrated shamans and our community. This is warrior’s work and they’ve been doing it for thousands of years… It involves iboga (African plant medicine) and lots more…
Got Qs? Book a 45 min discovery call FREE
With love,
Caitlyn
P.S. Other ways to step out of your comfort zone and find your POWER:
Mindful-somatic 1:1 online sessions informed by Internal Family Systems
