Discomfort: Friend or Foe?

     Pain or discomfort can make me vigilant; comfort contributes to being vulnerable to more suffering. In my case, I realize this from dealing with my physical issues as I get older. What has become evident is that in order for me to feel healthy and not exacerbate my growing physical ailments, I need to eat less more often, drink less coffee and more water, and exercise in moderation. Now these are not new insights for me. I realized this some time ago but what happens is - I forget. When I forget, I under-estimate and over-indulge.
     Comfort quietly ushers in the return to activities that offer fleeting enjoyment but always lead to my ignorance; a glitch in mindfulness, a dark spot on the lense of my awareness, where I lose sight of the fact that my feeling of comfort is slowly transforming into discomfort. Why? Because I lose sight of the fact that I am creating this discomfort, and my choices take on the familiar pattern of a revolving door.
     In this process, I forget that when I’m feeling good it’s a result of choices I’ve made. First, I begin to adjust my intake in order to cleanse my system. I get back to the point where the discomfort diminishes and I feel good. But too quickly I forget my involvement in this process, and the cycle begins again.
     In my case, when I am physically feeling good I forget that in order to continue to feel this way, I need to pay attention to how and what I eat. If not, I overindulge. I then feel less comfort and tend to increase the amount I ate when I was feeling good, in a futile attempt to get the good feeling back. This causes me to move further into the realm of discomfort until at some point, usually when I've crossed a line deep into my experience of discomfort, I realize that I need to alter this new reactionary pattern. A pattern of behavior that I have once again established in an attempt to create, or sustain, my comfort. It works the same for food, coffee intake, exercise, or anything I enjoy.
     In other words, I forget that discomfort reminds me to be vigilant about my contributions to the eternal ebb and flow of all the dichotomies of this human existence. A mistake that I make is that I interpret pain, discomfort, or suffering as something that comes from outside myself and impinges on what I have determined to be “my life.” The truth however, is that all of it is my life; be it pain or comfort, happiness or dis-ease. It’s not just my life, but life-as-it-is. And, like it or not, I am involved; I am responsible for the way it is for me.
     I realize today that this can be understood within the parameters of my practice. Ignorance is part of the nature of mind. We search for comfort through the dualistic process of human consciousness and intellectualization. The opposite of comfort is discomfort or suffering and it stands to reason that we should strive for what gives us comfort and avoid pain or suffering. One aspect of this way of being in the world however, is a blindness that emerges when we find a level of comfort. We might say we become ignorant; we ignore the obvious fact that there is a dependent-arising with all things and that we are a co-conspirator in the arising of our pain, as well as happiness or comfort.
     Whether our involvement is in the form of choices we make along the way, or the posture we adopt to the present situation as it “presents” itself to us in this moment - we are involved. Nothing arises in a vacuum. Dependent-Arising is errevocably embedded in our existence. As human beings we may be “great lord of all things” as Alexander Pope has so eloquently pointed out, yet we are just as surely, prey to all that is human.