Solstice Comfort

Tomorrow is the official day of the Winter Solstice. Soon, we will begin to see tiny increases in sunlight. I’m trying to stay away from an attachment to sunlight—but it is not easy.

As the sun mysteriously disappeared over the last few months I have found myself retreating into comfort, which is not a good place for me to inhabit. I know this instinctively but have also had this validated by virtually every avenue possible: Ayurveda, the Enneagram, the Tarot, the I Ching, psychotherapy, my mother, and simple common sense.

Comfort is an insidious force. After all, comfort can feel really good at a certain level. Who doesn’t like the comfort of wrapping ourselves in a blanket in front of the tv and just zoning out for a while? But, when carried to an extreme, that comfortable situation can turn to sloth, and it can happen without us even recognizing it’s happening.

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Comfort and the current world

This time around, comfort manifested itself in a very uncomfortable way: current world events.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself glued to the television, wondering how we let our world slide back into horrors I naively thought we had overcome. This triggered many difficult emotions and I pondered how or even if I could best serve the common good as my country of origin descended into the abyss. I worried that for all my commitment to mindfulness, non-violence, and compassion, I was not finding a helpful avenue for action.

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As I basked in these feelings of despair, I began to see that my attachment to the outcome of current events is comfortable for me, as uncomfortable as it may seem. I am comfortable raging (both inwardly and outwardly) about the state of the world while ignoring ways in which I could truly contribute to the common good—the WE.

Meanwhile, life goes on

Comfort even helps me to ignore writing my Blog! I’m learning that maintaining a blog is not for the faint of heart—it requires being very uncomfortable. During my “hiatus” from my blog, life has gone on around and within me. I engaged in a semester long Tibetan Medicine class, attended a Tibetan Buddhist retreat, celebrated Thanksgiving with friends, figured out my Medicare plans (to whatever degree that is possible), visited with friends, went to shows, danced, sang, had lunches with friends, and shoveled a fair amount of snow. Yet still, in the background, this familiar dread has been murmuring, “The world is falling apart and you are doing nothing about it!” Oh, poor me, me, me, me, ME!!!

This inner voice is one with whom I’m familiar, and comfortable. It enables qualities in myself that I would do well to overcome: self-righteousness, helplessness, and cowardliness. It facilitates chronic inaction in the same way that the comfort of sitting in front of the TV day after day with a box of chocolates would.

Understanding the true nature of comfort

I think I’m finally beginning to understand the concept that comfort is not a state of joy and relaxation, but a state of passivity. It isn’t necessarily a state of physical or mental stillness but a state with which we’ve become overly familiar and to which we’ve become habituated. It could mean feeling comfort when catering to the demands of others, or a comfort with constantly being on the go, or comfort with being undervalued on the job, or comfort with aggression or timidity, or…  I see my state of comfort as a state of cowardice. And I am beginning to see this ongoing state of comfort as the enemy that hinders my ability to be of service to the world (including myself).

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“If you take the negative as absolute and definitive, however, you increase your worries and anxiety, whereas by broadening the way you look at a problem, you understand what is bad about it, but you accept it…”

― Dalai Lama XIV, My Spiritual Journey

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To overcome negative states, Ayurveda and Tibetan Buddhism suggest applying the opposite force. For the person who settles into the comfort of physical sloth, physical movement might be a start, or if someone is comfortable being constantly “on the go”, intentional periods of repose and contemplation may be in order.  

For me, this means staying aware and informed while wrestling with the discomfort of knowing that my inner desire to see myself as the moral arbiter of all things (political and otherwise) may not be serving either myself or the world.  It means letting go of that comfortable (but unhelpful) feeling of rage and angst. It means (and this is the really hard part) cultivating a genuine feeling of compassion towards all living beings—even those with whom I vehemently disagree. And it means recognizing that we are all connected, we all suffer and we ALL are worthy of compassion. This recognition of compassion, is in itself, an action. It’s a small seed waiting to bloom.

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“Profound happiness, unlike fleeting pleasures, is spiritual by nature. It depends on the happiness of others, and it is based on love and tenderness. We”

Dalai Lama XIV, My Spiritual Journey

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A seed germinates

Yesterday I was blind-sided by the news that a major Christian evangelical publication had spoken out against some of the behavior of those actively sewing seeds of hate. This happened a week or so after I decided to just let go (at least for now) of my obsession with current affairs and earnestly try to practice compassion. I felt a remarkable feeling of relief after reading of the germination of this seed and reminded myself that this had nothing to do with “me” and everything to do with “we”.

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Kindred Spirits reconvenes

In the January session we’ll explore awareness, the first step towards making any meaningful changes in our lives.