Embracing Discomfort Part #1

Episode #200 of Spiritual Shit Podcast

 So we are back. Hello and welcome to another episode of spiritual shit. I'm your host, Alea Lovely, and this is our 200th episode. We almost didn't make it here y'all. If this is the first episode you are listening to, welcome to our community. And if this is your 200th episode, I am so glad to have you back and engaging in this community.

Once again, As a lot of you know, I took a massive break where I essentially ended the podcast because I was suffering from some immense burnout after three years of producing so much content and going through another spiritual awakening. I had gone through an incredibly difficult pregnancy, as well as a traumatic postpartum period.

And Getting through all that during a pandemic was pretty intense and my desire and searching for what I believed in and what I was discovering about myself through spirituality was a mission and a quest that had ended in a space where I felt like I know who I finally am. And I don't, I don't need to search anymore.

So it was a crash landing and I needed that time to regather myself, recalibrate, figure out what direction I needed to go in. And this should feel like comfort for a lot of you who are like, I don't know who I am. It's like I'm almost 40 and still figuring it out. So you're definitely not alone. But with the current events that are happening in the world, I crave Conversation and connecting with others to understand their viewpoints on what's happening.

And so this podcast at the beginning was more of a focus and a journey on discovering the ins and outs and the novelties of spirituality. But that has. It's since changed where I understand that in order to be spiritual and connected and intuitive and empathetic and authentic, we need to talk to each other in a way that expands our humanity.

Because no matter what planet you came from or what star seed you are or whatever, you're still a human right now in this 3d world, listening to this podcast. And if we don't know how to human, then we don't know how to. Spirit, so to speak. So we're going to be talking about really intense things, difficult things, beautiful things, and the full scope of it.

I wanted to open the podcast up to a lot more topics that were not just in the box of very high level spirituality and hope to bring us more connection to ourselves, more rooting to ourselves and help us understand more deeply who we are and what we're doing here. So that said, because I was dealing with an immense amount of discomfort, we're about to engage in a three episode series around discomfort, the topic itself.

Now, if you were excited about interviews, do not worry. We have so many amazing people coming onto the podcast this season and I cannot wait to bring them to you. But I first want to start out with something that I've been dealing with personally. And a topic I think all of us can relate to in a massive way, which is dealing with discomfort.

So the series is what I'll, what I'll call it anyway, is embracing discomfort. It's going to be a three part podcast series that dives into the various facets of discomfort and how we can navigate through it. So in this first episode, we're going to explore what discomfort means to us and begin to unravel the complexities that surround it.

Now, I personally hate feeling uncomfortable, and I'm sure a lot of you can identify with that as well. But what's been happening to me recently that has really brought a spotlight to the surface is that discomfort shows up in our everyday life. All the time, right? Whether we're uncomfortable on waiting on the train when we go to work, or if we're uncomfortable because there's too much noise around us, or we're uncomfortable because we're waiting on that romantic partner, or we have discomfort because our finances are tight, or we're looking at our government and what they're doing or the discomfort of war and what that entails.

Like there's so many aspects of our world that cause us immense discomfort. And in my personal life, I started to look at how I, how well I deal with discomfort. And I noticed I don't actually deal with discomfort very well. Despite all of my training and learning and reading and researching, I am a person who needs my comfort, cancer, sun, sign.

Okay. I like my home to look a certain way. I like. Okay. Things to be clean. I like things to be quiet. I enjoy having control over my life and immense amount of control over my life. And what I've noticed, especially as becoming a mother and a step mom that children kind of change that for you. I was used to living on my own.

I was used to having my things and it's perfect place and Calling everything into a certain order. And that just was obliterated upon becoming a mom. So I have learned in, in a lot of facets of my life, that this discomfort is something that's not really going away. And for me to enjoy the life that I have for me to enjoy, My current human reality, for me to enjoy the transformation of even my spirituality, I need to learn how to deal with discomfort.

I need to be able to see it as an opportunity for growth and expansion. I need to feel it in my body and understand what happens in my soul when I'm experiencing discomfort and asking myself, what is this trying to teach me? Because It's my habit, and maybe yours as well, that when we're feeling or experiencing discomfort, that we might try to escape it.

So currently, as I'm recording this, there was two weeks of what I would call the Arctic tundra. We were having sub zero temperatures in Kansas City, and I really don't like the cold. I really don't. So there were these moments where I was like, we need to get out of here. Let's go to Mexico. I am looking on Pinterest and Instagram for where we can go stay, what we're going to go do, where we're going to go eat.

And there is no way for us to leave right now. And I thought, how, how do I stay in the discomfort of this season when I want it to be summer? But it's winter and I've used this analogy before on previous episodes, but this aspect of us wanting a different reality while we're in a different season and what does it mean to weather the storm?

What does it mean to weather the season? What does it mean to be there and find spaces, perspectives of gratitude and understanding while we're dealing with the discomfort? It's looking at our governmental system and telling myself we're escaping, we're going to be expats and go to another country when I don't intimately know the details of another country and what their discomforts offer yet.

But me feeling and having the privilege even of the consideration of let's move somewhere else. Let's get out of this place that is causing me a lot of discomfort. And it's interesting because oftentimes as humans, maybe it's a survival instinct or something. I'm not sure, but we, we opt out of that discomfort.

And the only way that we can really get out of the discomfort is to go through it. We have to deal with a discomfort. We have to know it's there. It's like if we wanted to start a workout regimen or something like that, it's going to feel not so savory at the beginning. It's going to be sweaty. And, you know, you might be hyperventilating, you're going to be sore and It's to go through the discomfort in order to get to what, where you're expanding now, what you want to expand into.

And so I want you to just think right now when you hear the word discomfort, what comes to mind? Thinking your personal life, what are you dealing with that is causing discomfort? Is it a physical sensation? Is it an emotional state? Maybe it's both. Let's dive into our personal perceptions of discomfort.

It's very interesting, especially living in a Western world. We've somehow come to the conclusion that we're not meant to experience discomfort. And if you've been raised in a country where a lot of the things that People experience all over the world. You don't have to experience here. Then you might think that this is something that shouldn't be happening.

I shouldn't be experiencing this. There are many things we shouldn't experience, but whether or not that exempts us from discomfort at all, I don't think is actually the point of our human experience. Now, if you're someone who's spiritual like me, I personally believe that. Earth is kind of an expansion accelerant.

I think those who decided to come here are accelerationists and we wanted to pack in the maximum amount of growth possible. That's just me. But if that's the case, then, then we wanted to experience this because it offers something, it serves as something in some regard or another. Right. And so what specific memories for you come to mind when you reflect on the times that you have felt discomfort?

Did you feel it was someone else's fault? Were you the victim in that discomfort? I don't want you to think necessarily of the really extreme things that you've experienced because sometimes those things are not just discomfort. They're downright traumatic or devastating. I'm not really talking about that.

What I'm talking about is that numbing, nagging sensation of discomfort when we can't get our way, when we really want something and it requires us to wait, when we really want to see something change and it requires us to work. Those moments of discomfort that are in our everyday life. In what ways do you distinguish between your physical discomfort or your emotional or mental discomfort?

I was at home one day and I had three kids in the house. There was a lot of noise and a lot of mess. And I realized recently that I think. Not think I've tested for it, but I have sensory processing disorder, which I don't know if I'd really call it a disorder because it is probably what helps me do my mediumship work.

I'm able to sense things beyond the normal perception, which makes me extra sensitive to sound. It makes me extra sensitive to. What I see in my visual world and it can be overstimulating. It can be overwhelming you know, to look at my surroundings and see that things are a mess or, you know, how much I need to do in order to clean up the house or how much work I need to do on my podcast or how much blah, blah, blah.

Right. So there's one day that plans had suddenly changed and what we were supposed to be doing that day was not going to be happening anymore because there was a snow day. So the kids were out of school and like there was, you know, the schedules were all different and somebody had to go to work and whatever.

And I remember this. Internal burning I was feeling because I had an idea of what I was going to do that day and I had a plan for what was going to happen with my work. And since I am a stay at home mom and someone who works at home, it's a combination of the two, the. The change in plans causes me personally a ton of discomfort.

I don't do very well when there's a shift in my routine because I have to gear myself up deeply mentally to prepare for the work that needs to be done. So I'm prepping myself throughout the week about what I'm going to do on each day and. Some of you guys are going to say that I'm neurotic. I am. But I don't like that change.

I don't like when I have an expectation and an outcome that I'm searching for, and that shifts on a dime. And in my daily life, that is happening now all the time. And as I've been diving into the aspects and perceptions of discomfort, I started to feel it well up inside of me physically first. Where my body started to get hot, my heart rate has increased.

I am known for having anxiety and heart palpitations, and I'm first sensing it happen in a very physical aspect where then I asked myself, what's wrong with me? What's wrong? And having to go introspectively and say, I think I'm experiencing discomfort. Hmm. Okay. What is uncomfortable to me right now?

And obviously it, to me, it's sometimes very, very clear because when things change or whatever, I'm frustrated, you know, I'm triggered by this particular instance. And so I'm able to identify it pretty quickly. However, there have been plenty of times where I haven't been able to identify the discomfort and why I'm feeling anxiety.

My body will feel it before my consciousness knows that it's coming on. And have you ever had that? Like, you're just like, I don't know what's wrong with me. Why am I so emotional? Is it the moon? Is that where, where are the stars at right now? You know, start asking that question, but then I started to take.

Really strong strides and exploring what's happening in my daily life that may cause discomfort and what's causing even overwhelm if you they stack on top of each other and so I'm sitting there in the kitchen and the Only comfort I can bring myself and satiate and soothe myself in this moment is to say the word discomfort over and over and over again to myself, but I was going like Discomfort, discomfort, discomfort, discomfort, discomfort, discomfort.

I'm feeling discomfort as a way to soothe myself and understand that I need to sit with this feeling in this moment right now. There's no escaping it. There's no changing it. I need to deal with it. And instead of escaping from it. Through, you know, shopping or being on Pinterest or you know, engaging on doom scrolling on Instagram.

I just wanted to sit with it. I wanted to acknowledge it. I wanted to understand it. I wanted to see it from a holistic perspective. And that was the first time I may have ever done that. I felt in my body and said, what am I feeling? Where's it coming from? And why does this cause me discomfort? Well, I tend to be pretty inflexible at times and having an expectation of how I think my life or my day is supposed to go.

Doesn't lend me to. the most pleasurable experience. Because when I, or you have an expectation of an outcome, oftentimes we put our intention towards what something we want, and it puts us in tension with the outcome. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't have a desire that you want to walk towards, but understand and know that if you're making intentions, you're putting yourself in Tension with that particular outcome.

So suffering is a necessary evil that comes with desiring something different. So in this moment, I'm experiencing discomfort because I wanted something different. I wanted to experience something different than what was or what is. And so it's. It's causing me suffering because instead of accepting the circumstances and the change of plans that was ahead of my day that day, I decided this shouldn't be, this is not what was supposed to happen, but it already happened past tense.

So there's no changing the past. I can change the future to provide safeguards from that happening again, but. You know, ultimately it can't control the future either. So how do I acclimate to the change in circumstance in this moment? How do I identify the cause of this comfort so I can put eyes on it and understand where the suffering is coming from?

So discomfort can stem from a variety of sources. Of course, it can be derived from desires, conflicts, relationships, illness. So I want you to take a moment to ask yourself, what is causing your own discomfort? There is It's so multifaceted in nature of what brings us suffering and how different and how different aspects of our life contribute towards it.

So number one, can you pinpoint a particular aspect of desire, conflict, relationships, or illness that is currently causing you discomfort? And how do these various sources of discomfort intersect and influence each other? In your life. So for instance, I talk very openly about my health journey. And I talk about it because I think that's something that a lot of people can, can deal with.

And I recently had a diagnosis that was really scary for me. I'm okay right now, but it may need surgery in the near future. And. That causes me a lot of discomfort because it causes a flood of feelings of the possibilities of death, which causes me a lot of discomfort as well. I think it caused a lot of people discomfort.

And there's this fear that arises inside of me about. What this conflict in my body is and what's happening in it. And, you know, stress is a big component for a lot of us that causes us discomfort in any aspect where we're not expecting or anticipating a particular outcome in our life can cause us stress.

And. Relationships can cause us stress. The things that we want in our life that we want to manifest can cause us stress. We can see an outcome in our future and say, I really want this. This is how I expect this to go and have the fear about what it will take to get there. And so even in my health journey, I'm like, okay, well, let's, let's really start to eat clean.

Let's do this. Let's do that. Let's reduce our stress this way. And out of the 10 things that I kind of listed out that would improve my health, I've maybe done two of them. And I thought, this is so interesting. Let me study this because you know, if you follow this podcast long enough, I am a avid researcher and love to turn things inside out.

And through my own experience, I'm watching myself and kind of studying myself and seeing why is it that I won't do the things I need to do to fix this problem when I have the answer of what would help. And yet. I still won't do it. Why is that? Well, the things that are on my list are going to cause me discomfort.

It's going to radically change the way that I do my life, my day to day life. It's going to take more energy and more effort from me that I may not have the capacity to to do. And it changes. And adds more work to the equation that I don't want that. My, my, my body at least doesn't, I internally do, but until my desire overrides what my body wants, then I'm not getting to that goal.

So there's discomfort involved in changing myself and in changing myself for the better. It is discomfort that brings us to expansion. In a lot of ways. And sometimes that discomfort can be from things that we're bringing into our own life, but sometimes that discomfort is external. And me personally, when I'm experiencing that kind of discomfort, I often ask myself, what am I supposed to be learning here?

And my largest frustration comes from when I don't know what that answer is when I'm experiencing discomfort, which feels like for no reason. Really like grinds my gears Because what is the meaning of this? Why is this happening is a question? I often ask that makes it feel more difficult Maybe than it needs to be so when we talk about these various sources of discomfort and how they intersect and influence each other It's really interesting because you can start to name out all of the discomforts That you have in your life.

And if you are a person who journals, I would highly encourage you to write this down. What are the areas in my life that I experienced the most discomfort and how do I try to escape it? Being able to identify the causes at least gives name to what's happening in our life. I have the discomfort of noise, of finances.

Of a work schedule. That's really non traditional. The discomfort of people in my neighborhood who are deciding to act up the discomfort of our country's policies and what's happening overseas, the discomfort of people's opinions and showing myself online. Like there are loads of discomforts that you can list for yourself, but how do they intersect and influence each other?

When I say intersect, I want to, I want you to look at the common themes that you might see when you're dealing with discomfort. What are the common themes? Because sometimes we can list off like, you know, finances or, you know, my, my parents or, you know, like whatever the thing is, but is there an underlying theme that goes with all of those discomforts?

For me, one of them is control. If I don't feel like I have control in my life, then there are unexpected things that happen that can rise up and. knock me off of my expectation, but surprised me and caused me a little bit of like, I don't know what's going on here. I feel out of sorts. This makes me feel discombobulated.

So I want to protect my safety above all. And the way that I protect my safety is by being a controlling asshole in my life. Sometimes I don't wish to control others, but I want to control my own circumstances. So, That, that can be an underlying theme that comes in a lot of places. You know, for instance, if like I have a huge money wound and if my finances aren't like in tip top shape, if anything dips, Ooh, it really can bring me a lot of discomfort because I don't feel like I have power and agency over my life if I don't have the money to do what I want to do at the whim, I decide to do it.

Now that's being really vulnerable because. I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm the most holy person ever. I am a very spiritual person, but I'm very human at the same time. And in that money, because I was, when I was young, we were really poor. There is agency that gave me power over my own life.

When I started working, when I was 14, I was working at Dairy Queen and You know, it was an unpleasurable experience. However, the money allowed me to escape some of the narratives and the lack of power I had as a child. So it became my agency and spirit is still very much teaching me how not to rely only on money as agency and power.

But I want to use my power for good. And if I don't have the money to do that, then I feel like my power is being taken away and there are other ways to explore power in, in healthy and beautiful and productive ways. But when, because of the money wound, It causes me an extreme amount of discomfort and I will react like a snail who's just been doused in salt.

I feel like I will wither away frantically writhing underneath the thing that's causing me discomfort. It feels like it's killing me. And I want you to think about times in your life that you might feel that, that type of discomfort, that level of What feels like the walls are closing in. So what is triggered within you when you are experiencing that suffering?

And are those triggers unique to that particular situation? Or have you encountered them in other areas in your life? They're interconnected. The triggers are and how they relate to our original sources of discomfort because that original money wound for me provides a discomfort of whenever my finances take a dip, take a hit, an unexpected expense comes in, something like that.

That I can immediately revert back to the original wound. I can revert back to that original wound of discomfort and react disproportionately to the situation that's happening in my now, right now. So for instance, I have, I have two stepchildren. I have my daughter. There are days, so I might be watching all of the kids at once by myself and.

At the beginning, I would experience a lot of anger and I'm like, where's this anger coming from? I'm not angry with the children. I love them dearly. I want them to be around. I enjoy their presence. But what is this reticent anger that I feel when there's too much noise or there's too much mess or there's too much need?

And I started to. Like really guilt myself. You are such an asshole. You know, you are the worst mom ever. You are this, that, and the other, like shaming and guilty myself for feeling this way, not understanding where the discomfort with this was actually coming from. Because once I sat down with it and I really started to examine it, what am I feeling in my body?

What is the message that is ruminating in my mind when all this is happening? What is the overwhelm? And where's the anxiety coming from? And because it doesn't feel like it's related to this instance right here, I'm experiencing a trigger. And if you've listened to this podcast for a while, our triggers are teachers.

So I'm asking my trigger, where are you coming from? What do you want me to learn? Like where, where, what am I feeling right now? And I closed my eyes and I sat there and immediately this flood of that same feeling, it's like it to me, triggers are like time signatures in our life. And brings us back to a particular wounding that we have.

And it can teach us an immense amount about ourselves. If we can just go there, go to that space of discomfort. A lot of times we won't do that because it's too painful, but I allowed myself to go there. Like, what are you trying to teach me? What is going on? And I go back to 10 to 12 year old version of myself where I was tasked with watching my younger three siblings.

A lot, whether that have been when my parents were going to choir practice or my dad was out at work or whatever, like I felt parentified at a very early age and remember feeling like, you know, well, you know, these aren't my kids. Like, why did my mom have so many kids and having that stress of feeling like it was on my shoulders, that my younger siblings aren't listening to me.

They're not following my instruction or direction. And I'm going to be responsible for the failures that my parents see upon returning home. Why is the house so messy? Why is this? Why is that? You know, my, my dad love him, but he could have been, he was very unpredictable when we were younger. He could come in and be the really fun, explorative, you know, dad, Disneyland dad, you know, and then there would be days where he would come home, dysregulated, overstimulated, and, you know, suddenly be really agitated and upset that the house was not clean.

And I understand my dad. Yeah. So much now as a parent I have a lot more grace for him now, but I remember that him coming in and feeling really angry or, you know, whatever, maybe had a hard day at work. And I think, you know, we, we all share some neurodivergence in our family, but came in and that overstimulation would, you know, throw them into a little bit of a tantrum.

And we, we were like, Oh, you know, we don't know what to do. So we felt nervous, anxious when he would come home. And that is not something I wish to pass on to my children. In the slightest, I want them to feel comfortable where they're at and not always feel on edge, not feel like they can't relax in their own home.

But I started to realize that like that wound was still there, that wound of feeling that responsibility, that wound of that fear of unpredictability, that fear of, you know, not being able to control my circumstances and situations and feeling like I'm going to get in trouble for this. I'm going to be, it's going to be on my ass if things don't go the way that, you know, others had expected.

So it was my job to keep everybody safe. And I In this moment, I turned from being completely single living on my own to pregnant and then stepmom of two children and then had a traumatic birth. So like a lot of trauma involved with suddenly becoming a parent in the middle of a pandemic. And it was revealing to me that this discomfort that I'm feeling is not just from from what I'm experiencing today, it's a, a deeper wound that I experienced a long time ago.

And since I decided to go there, reflect on the trigger that I was associating with the suffering, I was noticing a pattern and a theme that pops up a lot in my life. So Are there any instances where triggers from one source of discomfort have unexpectedly surfaced and to an unrelated area in your life?

Because it is my experience, at least, that those will show up over and over and over and over again until you were able to identify them and give them the eyes that they deserve to be seen with. And I watch my beautiful stepdaughter who feels responsible for her siblings. And I often am telling her, you don't have to feel responsible for this.

This is me and daddy's job. This is me and daddy's concern. You don't have to correct. You don't have to redirect. You don't have to watch, you know, here and there. She obviously has her responsibilities, but I'm reparenting. Myself through that process of, of dealing, doing that with her. And it's, it's full circle.

It's like, wow. Like I went through this to understand these aspects of myself in order to not repeat this pattern. And that's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for us to look at the patterns, the cycles, the wounding that we've always had and say, I'm just this way. This is just how it is.

And look at it with new eyes. And see that things can be different, things can change, but things can't change without the discomfort. It takes us out of what we've been doing all along to challenge us to do something different. Now, the hard part in that I think is not escaping that. And we'll cover that in a later episode, but.

Being able to identify the original sources of discomfort will help give us a better Grasp on what the original sources of discomfort were that continue to ripple through our life So it's February And I typically, when I was single and pre pandemic, I would travel out for February because I get seasonal affective disorder, sad disorder.

And I realized it's not the lack of sunlight that bothers me. I really like cloudy days, but it is the lack of green that I see that really bugs me about these winter months. So I'm dealing with. The snow and us having the snow for, you know, two weeks straight, which was too much for me. And all I can do is try to imagine being somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere warmer, somewhere prettier, you know, like that's all I can think about.

And just, just in that me searching for what's going to ease my suffering. It's causing me suffering. It's actually causing more discomfort than if I just sat with this and said, you know what, this is temporary. It's not going to last very long. I need to find a way to be grateful for where I'm at right now.

And I'm not telling you those of you who have experienced really traumatic things that you need to be grateful that that happened to you. I'm not saying that what I am saying is that when you're experiencing discomfort in the moment, if it's something you can control, then find ways to see it with gratitude.

What are you learning right now? Asking yourself the question, what am I learning right now? What am I learning about myself? What in this discomfort is triggering or trying to trigger healing within me? What is it trying to teach me? We've been taught far too long that when we experience a trigger that we need.

To avoid it. I love when people say trigger warning. It's interesting because like when someone says trigger warning, I don't, I don't ever turn it off. Like I still listen to it. It's like the courtesy to know, Hey, something negative is coming up. Have we become so adverse to discomfort that we're unwilling to look at what triggers us?

Controversial stance. I know. The reason I say that is because it's good that we're sensitive. It's good that we can feel our pain. But if we avoid it at all costs, we don't further examine what we can learn about ourselves. So I have an incredibly sensitive reaction when it comes to trigger warning SA, I'll say, and because I personally have had an experience like that.

And when I see it, hear about it especially on like a TV show or something like that, like triggers me to really detrimental space. And I have trauma there, you know, a lot of people have trauma there and I get angry, I get upset. I immediately start, you know, having these really unsavory thoughts about men.

And it's a lot of anger, a lot of anger because of what I've experienced in my own story. And the other day, I decided to watch this documentary about a woman who had experienced something and I thought to myself, like, I'm going to watch this, not because we need to watch things that cause us immense traumatization.

I'm not saying that, but because in my own power, I wanted to take my power back. I wanted to stop being so knocked off my feet when I heard about something like this. I wanted to deal with the pain that I experienced and learn how to. Not feel so taken aback when I hear about it and this might not be for you.

So I'm just going to preface that there, but I decided to watch this documentary. And there were these moments where like, I just didn't want to listen. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to know the details. I still don't want to know the details, but I sat. With it, because I thought this woman is telling her story.

And I think it's important for me to listen to her story because she's experienced something horrific and she needs to feel seen. And in this moment, even though I don't know her personally, I'm going to listen to what she has to say, because in her experience, maybe I can bring better awareness to what's happening.

Maybe just through listening to her, she heals. Now, again, this might not be for everyone, but if you consider yourself a light worker on this earth, someone who's here to transmute darkness, then by all means, we are going to find things that trigger us deeply and we need in order to transmute it. We have to deal with that discomfort in some way or another and reflect on the triggers that are associated with our suffering to see the patterns, to see the themes, to see the wounds, so we can heal them.

You can't heal what you can't feel. So taking that time to really look at them and you don't have to go to that degree, right? Baby steps. Maybe discomfort is waiting. Maybe you have an issue with patience. That used to be mine. I'm much better at it now. But if your issue is patience, you know, signing up for things that you have to wait for, or You know, maybe you're waiting on that partner and saying, I will gratefully stand in my singleness and exist here until the perfect person comes along.

And it'll be shown to me like until then I'm, I'm chilling. I'm not going to worry. I'm not going to assign meaning to the weight that meant. That I'm not going to experience this thing at all. You know, I used to do that. A lot of people do this. When we don't think or see things coming in our timeline, we will say it's never going to happen.

We avoid it to, to shut off our vulnerability to the waiting because the waiting is what's uncomfortable. The waiting causes us suffering. The waiting causes us discomfort. So we'll tell ourselves it's not available to us because I can't bear to wait. Isn't that interesting? The universe can be willing and ready to give you something on its timeline, and we will say it does not exist because I have to wait.

The discomfort is too much for me to bear, so I don't want it at all. And it's as ridiculous as saying during this winter, I want summer and summer is never going to fucking come. So I don't believe in summer anymore. Summer is never going to happen. And you'll be looking like a clown with a pie on your face when summer eventually comes.

But because we could be closed off to it, you know, like, it's like, all right, well, I'm just going to move to the winter tundra cause summer's never coming. You know, like it just, it doesn't make sense, but that's how discomfort can work when we're not aware of what's. What's causing the discomfort, if we're not willing to look at it or deal with it or see it or identify it to understand its trigger to know that this is temporary, we will see a different reality soon, or maybe not soon, but being able to embrace the discomfort, it relieves us of that suffering.

If we understand that we have to wait for something, then we can mitigate the suffering that we're feeling by being impatient. If I'm looking at my household in the overwhelming mess that it is, and all of the tasks that I think that I have to do, and like, those of you who are neat freaks would understand.

If you're not, you might not get this analogy, but. I want my house to feel beautiful. I love walking around and seeing, it's like artistic to me, seeing the beauty I've created with perfect pillows and color palettes and paint. And I'd love seeing it arranged because if I can't leave my house because it's fucking winter, then I want to be able to look around and enjoy my surroundings and, and I've done that in every apartment I've been in.

Every house that I've lived in, I've made that space something artistically that speaks to me, that gives me energy from its beauty. But when there are other people living in the house, they don't maintain the same level of beauty I'd hope to see in my house. And when I have that expectation that everything needs to be perfect all the time, you know, then that causes me suffering because it's just not going to be.

It's not, it's not realistic. My sister came over one time and she said, it looks like people live here. And I was like, Oh, and she's like, it's a good thing. It looks like people live here. And what she was saying is because normally it doesn't look like people live there. I'm so meticulous about stains and dust and arrangements and you know, whatever, that I may have been creating a household that my children don't feel comfortable living in.

Ooh, that was a tough one to swallow, but when I recognized that I didn't have that kind of control and I also didn't have the capacity to keep that type of control and I didn't want my children not to feel like they live in this house. I had to release what I was holding on to. in order to open myself up to expand.

And I have, I'm proud of myself to say this, but I have gotten comfortable with the mess. I'm not super comfortable with it, but I've gotten more comfortable with it where I've been able to expand. I've been able to release some of that control, you know, let my shoulders fall down, open myself up to the possibility that this is better for them.

You know, and, and, and when I'm, you know, 50 or so, I can have my perfectly clean house where nobody touches anything and the figurines are in the places they need to be or whatever the crystals and whatnot. Like, but right now this is temporary. This is a short part in their life where they're allowed to be children.

I'm using this example because this is most close to me right now, but in your life right now, what are you facing discomfort wise that is causing you suffering? Because you are. Holding so tightly to a rigid ideal of what should be instead of accepting what is. Now, this doesn't apply to like activism.

This doesn't apply to changing the world for the better. I just mean in your day to day life, because discomfort opens our eyes to the wounding that we need to heal. We see the discomfort happening in our world right now. And in a lot of ways, which is like, I mean, this is a hundred percent why I brought the podcast back.

A hundred percent, like this discomfort that we were feeling in this country charged me to action to come back on here to say, cease fire, that we need a change in the way that we think about humanity, fundamentally speaking, and that's uncomfortable for a lot of people. To give up our comforts, our pleasures, our privileges in order to speak up for others who desperately need it without alienating everybody in our life.

We need to be able to have these conversations, these uncomfortable conversations in order to fundamentally change the way we see our world. And a lot of people don't want to do that. You see people fighting still for systems that are 7, 500 years old. They went the old way because that was where they were comfortable.

And we are in the age of Aquarius. So that's not going to fly. That's not going to stay the same. We are seeing systems crumble before our eyes because we cannot stay in our comfort any longer. We must look at the wounds. We must. Deal with the discomfort we're feeling in order to usher in a better way a better World now that's on a larger scale But for you personally in your home right now or in your car wherever you're listening to this podcast What are the aspects of discomfort that you can identify in your life?

That you can identify your triggers and define what discomfort means to you. Discomfort to me is I don't have control over my life. Something unexpected is going to happen. It's going to cost me a lot of energy. And I don't like that. Why don't I like it? Ask yourself the question. Why don't I like this?

What does it make me feel? What uncertainty does it bring to the table? And how can I really look at it, look at it in its face without trying to escape it in order to grow from it? So that concludes our first episode of this series. I look forward to talking to you next week where we're going to talk about confronting discomfort and we're going to focus on the ways that we view and cope with the challenges that arise when we're in an uncomfortable situation.

So thank you for our first episode back. I'm so glad to be back and so happy to have you along this journey. Please share this episode with someone you love and we'll talk to you next week.