The discomfort of life

How would I sum up my life throughout 2020 so far in one word?  Uncomfortable.

That’s not to say there haven’t been great moments or days.  There has been.  There have been whole weeks filled with laughter, love, fun & excitement.  Overall however, this year has been majorly uncomfortable.  As challenging as that has been, I’m also incredibly grateful to have had (& still be having) the experience of having to exist within the discomfort of life.

Life itself is not supposed to be ‘rainbows & unicorns’ all of the time but for some reason we, as humans, often expect it to be.  So when the uncomfortable feelings & emotions show up, we run away from them instead of allowing them to just be.  For some reason most of us cannot simply let uncomfortable emotions exist within us.  We do whatever we can to distract ourselves (alcohol, partying. Netflix, working out, reading, chatting, arguing, the list goes on and on) from fully experiencing what we need to in those moments.  We do ourselves a major disservice as those feelings & emotions do not magically disappear just because we successfully distracted ourselves from feeling them in their entirety.  They get buried deep in the mind instead.  They stay within us & they then go on to affect us later on without us even being aware of it.

When I say that I am incredibly grateful to be having such an uncomfortable year, it’s because I am acknowledging that I have spent most of my 30 years on earth burying & suppressing any ‘bad’ feelings or emotions that I’ve had.  Now I am slowly learning to let these feelings arise to the surface of my conscious mind & actually feel them so that they can be let go of once and for all.  It is a very challenging and difficult thing to do.  But I am aware of how necessary it is for me to be going through this very deep process.

So why am I sharing this?  Because this year, 2020 has been intense for not just me but for so many.  Although we have all been facing different circumstances as individuals, collectively we have all faced a lot of discomfort.  While everything has been intensified without our usual distractions to run to when things get challenging, we have no option but to face those feelings head on.  Sometimes it feels overwhelming & impossible.  But it isn’t.
It will pass.  Just as everything in life does.  So let yourself feel all of the things that you need to feel in order to be whole.  The ‘good’ feelings & the ‘bad’.  We can’t have one without the other.

So if you are reading this & can relate your experience of 2020 to my own, remember to be kind to yourself & make sure that you rest when you need to.  Most importantly though, make sure that you keep going too.  This inner work is deep, challenging & very uncomfortable.  But we can’t have the ‘love & light’ part of life without also acknowledging the shadows that live within us too.

Life will be uncomfortable some of the time.  Let’s learn to exist within that discomfort anyway.

xxx

Photo credit to Christian Puta.