When I get sick, I take it seriously. I rest. I drink fluids. I pay attention.
When I tweak my back lifting something wrong, I see someone. I do the exercises. I let it heal.
When I eat something that doesn't agree with me, I notice. I probably won't eat it again for a while.
Physical discomfort, I honor. I treat it as information.
But psychological discomfort? For most of my life, I had a different relationship with that one. And I see it everywhere I look.
When something feels off in a conversation, we talk over it. When tension builds in a relationship, we get busy. When a feeling shows up that we don't want to feel, we distract, defend, or rationalize it away.
We've gotten very good at not feeling what we feel.
Fifty Years of Going Toward It
For nearly fifty years, I've been showing up to do this work in one form or another.
Men's rite of passage gatherings. Yoga intensives. Meditation retreats. Movement trainings. Shamanic practices. Process groups. Long conversations with individuals where the only real agenda was telling the truth and seeing what happened.
All of it, in different ways, designed to do the same thing: take me deeper into the patterns and beliefs that form who I am and how I behave. Expose the soft underbelly I'd otherwise spend a lot of energy keeping covered.
What I learned, over and over, was simple:
Unfamiliarity breeds fear.
The parts of myself I didn't know — the reactions, the defenses, the inherited beliefs running quietly underneath my decisions — those were the parts that had power over me. The more familiar I became with my own psychology, my own wiring, my own conditioned responses, the easier and more comfortably I could move through life.
And the more familiar I became with the same dynamics in other people, the more present I could be with them, even when what they were going through was hard.
The strange paradox of this work is that going toward discomfort, again and again, made me more comfortable in my own skin. Not less.
What I've Learned to Trust
Here's something I've come to believe deeply:
Discomfort is often at its greatest right before something breaks open.
Right before the answer comes. Right before a relationship turns a corner. Right before you finally see the thing that's been tripping you up for months, or years, or sometimes most of your adult life.
I've watched this in myself. I've watched it in person after person I've worked with. Peak intensity isn't a sign that things are getting worse. It's often the last resistance before something gives way.
The mind doesn't know that. The mind reads peak discomfort as proof that this approach isn't working, and pushes us to abandon the thing right at the moment it was about to teach us something.
Being With Someone in Theirs
I want to tell you about someone who worked for me once.
She came into my office on a difficult morning, carrying something heavy from her personal life. She didn't ask for advice. She didn't really ask for anything. She just needed somewhere to bring what she was feeling.
I didn't try to fix it. I didn't redirect the conversation. I didn't offer solutions or perspective. I just sat with her while she felt what she was feeling.
That was the whole thing.
She still mentions it to me, years later. Not because I said something wise. Because I didn't try to make her discomfort go away.
It took me a long time to understand that being with someone in their discomfort, really with them, is one of the most generous things a person can offer. And it's only possible if you've practiced being with your own.
You can't sit with what you haven't sat with.
What I Almost Missed
Years ago I was working with a leader who was stuck. Genuinely stuck. He had done everything he was supposed to do. Strategy. Communication. The right hires, the right structure, the right moves. And something was still missing in how his team showed up.
For weeks, our conversations got harder, not easier. He kept asking what to do. I kept asking him what he was feeling. He resisted that. He wanted a solution. He didn't want to feel what was underneath.
And then one afternoon, in the middle of yet another loop, something shifted. He got quiet. He sat back. And he said something he hadn't said in any of our previous sessions, about a fear he'd been carrying since childhood about not being enough.
That was the block. Right there. The whole thing.
He didn't need a new strategy. He needed to feel the thing he'd been spending his whole career trying to outrun.
The discomfort was at its greatest right before it gave way.
The Body Already Knows
What I find interesting, and what the neuroscience increasingly supports, is that the body usually knows before the mind does.
The tightness in the chest. The held breath. The restlessness that shows up when you're avoiding something. The way your sleep changes when there's a conversation you keep meaning to have.
Those signals aren't random. The nervous system is telling you something needs attention. The same way your back tells you you lifted wrong, or your stomach tells you that food was off.
Physical discomfort, we honor. We rest, we recover, we adjust.
Psychological discomfort, we override.
The body doesn't know the difference. The signals come from the same place. The rest, the recovery, the adjustment work the same way. The only difference is that the practice happens in stillness rather than stretching.
What Keeps Me Going Back
I'm not going to tell you discomfort is fun. It isn't. After almost fifty years of this work, I still resist on some days. The pull to look away is strong and it never fully goes away.
But I keep showing up. To the groups, to the practices, to the smaller moments inside the rest of my week where something difficult wants my attention and I have to choose whether to feel it or escape it.
What I can tell you is that almost everything that's mattered in my life and my work has come through the doorway of discomfort. The relationships that lasted. The clarity that finally arrived. The blind spots that finally became visible. The conversations that took years to have, and changed everything once I had them.
The discomfort wasn't the obstacle.
It was the path.
What's an uncomfortable thing in your life right now that might be closer to resolution than it feels?
