Discomfort is information, not malfunction.

Something that, that came up a number of times in the interviews, um, that Kathleen and I did recently for our summit Metamorphosis was that in change we are to expect struggle.

And I don't mean that in a, a masochistic way.

I don't mean that in everything should be hard and unenjoyable and horrible.

But I guess I'm bringing some awareness to what I see as the physiological and psychological and social need for safety and, to an extent, to perhaps comfort, how in many ways that has been hijacked.

You know, you can make a lot of money keeping people really comfortable and feeling safe.

And when that drive to be safe is hijacked and our world is engineered in a way where we expect comfort and we don't expect struggle, and we don't expect tension or friction or resistance, what happens when we encounter it? Well, I would say we try to avoid it.

We try to bring in more comfort.

We are not being kind of primed...

And I, I guess, again, like I always say in these podcasts, I'm speaking from my own experience, my own lived experience.

I'm speaking from a Anglo Western perspective because that is the experience that I've had, that in the culture that I was raised in, there is more and more, uh, focus and corralling into comfort and ease.

And I'm a pleasure activist.

Like, I am here for more felt sense of joy and pleasure and delight and eros.

But I think it's to be experienced within a, a capacity that also we have the ability to be with the things that are a bit gritty and a bit stretchy.

Because without that, what happens is we become almost dulled.

Like, the comfort is soporific in its, its way that it lives kind of on us, you know, like a blanket.

I love blankets.

But it kind of lives on us where we're perpetually comfortable and warm, and then there's no contrast.

And so I, I'm curious and I wonder about what happens when there's no contrast.

Well, I think that's when we go outward seeking ways to create friction.

We almost try to create friction perhaps in our lives by moving towards edges to bring some aliveness into our existence, into our experience.

And again, I think there's a kind of instinctive natural force at play there where there's looking for something that is opposite to this perpetual kind of comfort and safety and gentleness maybe if we find ourselves kind of always surrounded by the pillows.

And so what I feel that that does, we've had this sense of need for safety hijacked by marketing and consumerism, is that we actually have no kind of robustness or resilience when it comes-- when that change comes in, as it always seems to do, in unexpected ways.

And then instead of being able to meet that change and be with it and have capacity for it, we look and reach for more comfort, more ways to be disconnected from the experience and the friction than that-- that that change is bringing.

Which makes entire sense, right? Because if we haven't practiced at something, if we haven't built up capacity to be with something that feels super uncomfortable or that is really frustrating, we're going to try to move away from that.

And there are all these different ways that we might move away from that.