Becoming comfortable with discomfort

I’m sitting in the dark as I write this because the power has gone out at my hotel. It’s really hot inside with no a/c or ceiling fan so I came outside to the very dark deck with my computer. It’s an interesting feeling to not be able to see anything but to hear Balinese night noises all around me. There is a symphony of crickets, frogs, the occasional duck, the ubiquitous motorbike and car traffic and the chattering of hotel employees trying to deal with the power outage. This turns out to be an appropriate setting for the post I wanted to write (which will have to wait to go up until the wifi works again).

Our evening yoga class is yin style, meaning the movements are slower, deeper, and held for longer than in a regular vinyasa class. I love practicing yin yoga because I love the gentleness of it, but to do it, you have to be able to become comfortable with discomfort. It’s hard to stay in a posture for three minutes at a time. The natural inclination is to fidget, to think about all sorts of things that distract you from the moment, and the muscles you’re stretching start to complain even though you may have two more minutes to stay still.

In the course of this, thoughts and emotions rise up within you. This has been challenging because thoughts and feelings rising up within me have been rather unpleasant. My natural inclination is to want to fix the unpleasantness or just get rid of it, but unfortunately that’s not how things work. These thoughts are meant to be observed without judgement. They may stick around for awhile till I’m able to release them. I don't know how long that might take. I have to learn to accept that...without judgement.

One of the most beautiful metaphors in the yoga tradition (and also the Hindu and Buddhist traditions) is that of the lotus flower. You should see the kind of swampy, mucky, filthy pond where lotus flowers grow. There’s such a pond right outside our practice space and I would hate to accidentally slip and fall in. It’s gross. But out of that slimy mud grows  the most beautiful, big, pink flowers. The metaphor is that we are all like the lotus flower. We all have muck in our lives that we have to deal with. That’s just part of being human. But out of all that dirtiness, if we let it, comes growth and perhaps eventually the manifestation of beauty.