Moving Outside Your Comfort Zone
by Abbey Spiro, Certified and Registered Yoga Teacher
It is human nature to pursue comfort - to lean towards the experiences that feel like a comfy couch, a warm blanket, and your favorite show on tv.
Finding our way into spaces that feel good and familiar helps with stress reduction and reminds our brain that we are safe.
But if someone were to ask us, most of us would say that we feel most alive when we’re learning something new, stretching ourselves (or our beliefs) beyond the confines of “ease” and out into the wild world of growth. The space that lies just beyond that invisible line of our comfort zone is a place where we stop being static and start growing. That space has an entrance fee, and the fee is discomfort.
Ooooh discomfort. It comes in an infinite amount of shapes and sizes, textures and feelings. It’s putting sandy feet in dry tennis shoes. It’s that annoying little voice that says “what if you fail?”. It can be physical in nature or it can show up in the mind - that difficult to describe feeling when you find yourself resisting something that doesn’t have a known ending.
We often have a negative opinion of that specific uncomfortable feeling, like it’s something to be avoided.
“Discomfort is just the feeling that occurs right before we grow and expand in some way - it is the friction of personal growth. ”
But if we can re-negotiate our relationship with that feeling, it can become a stepping stone instead of an obstacle.
Discomfort is just the feeling that occurs right before we grow and expand in some way - it is the friction of personal growth. That feeling is actually a sign that we’re on the right track - headed toward a new version of ourselves.
The next time you find yourself feeling uncomfortable, maybe instead of asking yourself, “How do I get out of this? How do I make this stop?” you could try asking another question:
“What beautiful new place is this taking me to?”