Comfort is a Skill Developed Over Time
How to expand your 'comfort zone' to literally everything.
📍 Coordinates: Casa Nautika Retreat Center, Costa Rica. 🌴
🧉 Vibecheck: (1) Hello from the jungles of Costa Rica! Feeling rooted, centred, and excited after a few weeks immersed in nature, preparing for the Hero100. (2) Had an exceptional conversation recently with my friend Carlos Farias of ‘The Truth’ podcast. Tune in for musings on psychedelic therapy, plant medicine, awakening traditions, and serious play. (3) We are in the final week before the Hero100 begins. Doors close on March 28, we begin April 1. Let’s do this. ⚡️
"Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation." — Rainer Maria Rilke
External situations have next to no impact on your internal state…
While this impact is not zero, it’s far less than you assume. It’s certainly far less than the impact you let them have currently.
They serve as initial triggers, setting in motion an internal process that results in your felt state of comfort or discomfort.
Comfort, you see, is an attitude.
It is an active choice about how to relate to life. And control of your attitude is one of your core freedoms as a human being.
It is a skill that you develop, not something granted to you by some unseen power beyond yourself.
“But it’s cold and snowy outside, and when I go outside, I get uncomfortable.”
Ah, herein lies the problem!
The cold is a trigger, which sets off your (now automatic) process of being uncomfortable with it. At some point in your life, you associated cold with discomfort, and now this process is automatic.
It does not need to be this way.
What if you chose to be comfortable in the cold?
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean that this is a state you would choose to spend the rest of your life in. It doesn’t mean you can snap your fingers and have this wish granted to you overnight.
This is why comfort is a skill developed over time.
By continually choosing comfort as your attitude to situations, you reorient your relationship to it and increase your comfort in all situations.
Experience is. The arbitrary label you put after it determines your level of comfort or discomfort.
It is most fundamentally your resistance to the experience that creates suffering and discomfort. Dissolve the resistance, dissolve the discomfort.
Cold exposure is a very powerful example, but there are innumerable others.
Discomfort in social situations.
Discomfort when speaking your truth.
Discomfort sitting down in silence.
Discomfort looking at your reflection in the mirror.
Resistance is the byproduct of an attitude.
An attitude that is hostile to your experience, an attitude that welcomes only a small slice of possible sensations. When this resistance is dissolved, you enter into a welcoming, curious, open attitude to the immediate sensations of experience, and everything changes.
Notice the difference between these statements:
“Cold water is terrible, it’s like torture, why would anyone do that to themselves?” vs. “Cold water is invigorating, vitalizing, it reminds me that I am alive.”
The external circumstance (exposure to cold water) is exactly the same in both situations and yet the outcome, the attitude, and the relationship to the experience are night and day different.
This is what Rilke meant in the quote above. Right when you are at your limit of comfort, you are also at the razor’s edge of transformation.
The bubble can be popped. “Why am I uncomfortable with this? It is in my power to choose my attitude towards this. What would happen if I chose comfort?” Again, and again, and again.
You have increased your capacity to be comfortable with a wider range of experiences.
You can, through time, completely obliterate the idea of a ‘comfort zone’, with some experiences inside and others outside, by expanding your range of comfort to include the totality of possible experience.
It is important to understand how valuable this is.
All growth, all evolution, and all transformation require pushing beyond your existing comfort zone and capacities into new, uncharted territory.
Developing the skill of being comfortable in challenging, previously uncomfortable situations, is one of the ultimate skills to have with you.
Like the development of all internal skills, you need a container, an object, to cultivate this with.
“The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.” — Nietzsche
This is the Way of Self-Mastery.
Of transmuting the uncomfortable and foreign into the comfortable and welcomed. Running with open arms to the limits of your capacity, and transmuting with attitude, effort, and choice over time your relationship to it.
I have been talking for several weeks now about the Hero100. This is what we are doing. We are training an increased level of comfort, first deep comfort with yourself, and second deep comfort with external circumstances.
The end result is a personal transformation that equips you with the ultimate meta-skill, that of comfort on demand, with whatever life throws at you.
This reduces your hesitation so that you can act at your full power, exactly when it is necessary. This is the opportunity for heroes. This is where warriors are made.
This is cultivating deep comfort…
… with challenging experience after spending 5+ hours submerged in the frigid waters of cold showers.
… with physical sensations on the other side of 1200+ hours fasting without food.
… with external circumstances after intentionally removing 100+ physical possessions from your life.
… with your own thoughts and beliefs after 30+ hours in deep meditation.
… with your full range of emotions after 30+ hours of stream-of-consciousness journaling.
… with discipline and self-love by taking 100+ attempts at a meaningful ritual of your own choosing.
These are the vehicles we have chosen to cultivate what I would call deep okayness in all situations.
After 100 days straight of increasing your threshold of discomfort, you will be fundamentally prepared for whatever the future holds.
Not because you know exactly how to handle it. Not because it’s something you desire. But because you have gnosis – an embodied knowledge, that you can handle it. That you can not only survive it but thrive because of it.
This is the fundamental and foundational transformation in the Hero100.
We are closing the doors to this experience soon for our first cohort. Doors close on March 28, and we begin this journey on April 1st.
I hope to see you there.
With love, EB.