Have you heard about frogs and boiling pots?
If you drop a frog in a boiling pot, it will hop out. However if you put a frog in lukewarm water and then gradually heat up, it will never get out even when the water becomes boiling. While this literally happens with frogs, in some ways it can also happen with people.
One of the tendencies that many people have is to settle for what is comfortable, yet also uncomfortable. I call this the comfortable discomfort, and its the areas of your life where you find yourself compromising and settling for less because it seems easier to do that than to take action and create changes. It’s that little voice that tells you to sleep in a little longer instead of getting up and exercising. It’s that voice that tells you to stick with that job you hate, because at least you’re making enough money to survive.
The comfortable discomfort is the pot of water that is getting hotter and hotter. You feel uncomfortable, but you stay in the pot because its familiar, until…
One day you realize that you aren’t all that happy and you want to get out of that pot. You want something different, but it feels so familiar as well, so you stay, because its comfortable even as its uncomfortable.
It’s a contradiction!
I’m not a fan of the comfortable discomfort, but I’ve definitely inhabited the comfortable discomfort at different points of my life. What I have learned is that when I settle for the comfortable discomfort it keeps a vital part of me small and unhappy. That part of me will grouse and complain and itch to change something. The rest of me will try to justify why whatever the current situation is better than doing what I really ought to do, which is make some changes in my life.
This is a pattern of behavior. We stick with patterns we know because they are familiar, even when it can cost us a lot to do so.
One of the spiritual practices that a witch or magicians needs to learn is a practice of inner alchemy or what some people will call shadow work. An inner alchemical shadow work practice allows you to discover all the unconscious patterns of behavior that show up in your life. These patterns of behavior are usually safety mechanisms and survival behaviors you learned early on as a way to help you navigate through times. They may also be epigenetic shadows carried on from your ancestors trauma.
These patterns of behavior can often define our experiences in ways we don’t realize, so that we find ourselves unknowingly repeating them in our lives. When this happens, the shadow shows up. More importantly, you may find yourself in an all too familiar space - the comfortable discomfort, which will feel like the same old, same old.
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Many people will try different ways to change their behaviors and get out of the comfortable discomfort. They’ll try to adopt a new habit or they’ll try to abstain from an addiction. Often they’ll apply their willpower to making this change and for a short time it will work.
Until it doesn’t work.
You’ve likely had this experience where you’ve committed to making a change in your life and within a short period of time you’re back in the vagueness of the comfortable discomfort, back to your usual routines and habits, because it’s what you know, it’s easy and even though it’s uncomfortable, it has the comfort of what you know.
That’s why new years resolutions are such a joke.
The problem is that you’re trying to make a change on the behavioral level and force it into place with a limited resource, your will power, in the hopes that it will be enough. And usually it isn’t. In fact, I can’t recall a time in my life where this has ever worked, but it is often touted as the solution in so many self help books.
Short term efforts lead to short term impacts. If you truly want to change something in your life you need to take a different approach.
An Example from my Life
A few years ago I was lost. I had a home I lived in, but I didn’t really know anyone in the town I lived. I worked at a job during the day and I door dashed at night. I was stewing in a place of unhappiness and misery, and yet it felt comfortable. I also have to admit that in some ways I needed to be in that space because I had hit bottom in my life. I had lost relationships, my confidence and a lot more because of choices I had made.
I already that making short term changes wasn’t enough. I also knew impulsively leaping into yet another relationship would only be a short term distraction. So I worked during the day and door dashed at night and did a lot of thinking about my life. I didn’t have a solution though. I just had a better sense of how alone I felt. I was adrift.
One evening I had just gotten home from dashing. I was tired and hungry and feeling really unmoored. My room mate at the time asked me if I could give her a few minutes after I ate and I nodded my head.
After I finished eating, I joined her in a room that I called my sanctuary. It was my dedicated magical space, but I wasn’t doing a lot of magic then. We both sat on the floor and she pulled out one of my note books and flipped to an empty page. She drew a triangle and she labeled the the three corners. One corner was labeled home, another was labeled employment and another was labeled relationships.
She then shared that she was worried about me. She saw how unhappy I was and she shared that she didn’t think my routine was working for me.
“There’s more to life than just working and you’re not even happy with the work you’re doing.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“The only thing keeping you here is the house you’ve bought. You don’t have any roots or a sense of connection to anyone.”
She was right about that too.
She told me she was planning on leaving soon and she wanted to make sure I was going to be okay. It was a moment of clarity that helped me realized that what I really needed to change involved pushing myself out of the comfortable discomfort I was in. So I did something important: I finally went to a martial arts studio and started taking classes. I was truly uncomfortable initially, but then I discovered I was happier. I started to make connections with other people and truly build a life.
I continued pushing myself to go out and do other activities I had put on hold for way too long in my life. I started going to concerts, open mic nights, dancing, and a variety of other activities that brought me into contact with that part of myself that had been agitating for a change.
These weren’t just behavioral changes. They went deeper than that. They had to go deeper in order for me to push myself into a new state of being. They were changes I was making on the identity level.
I claimed the identity of being a martial artist and changed my life in the process. I started going to a school, learning kung fu and in the process making friends, because I pushed myself out of the comfortable discomfort and stretched myself to become a different person.
Oh, you might have noticed I haven’t written much about magic rituals in this article. This wasn’t something magic could solved. I had to be willing to change who I was on an internal level and bring that in the reality around me.
It’s the power of changing your relationship from the inside out. You change who you are on the inside and it translates to how you relate to the world around you. I went to martial arts, joined a men’s circle and put myself out into the world and it changed my reality. Suddenly I was meeting more people and expanding my horizons beyond what I knew and so my relationship with reality changed.
Of course, there are techniques you can use to help you with this process. I share some of them in Meditation Mastery 2, where I walk you through how to turn your inner fears and doubts into allies and show you how to dissolve tension with your breath. Techniques are good to know, but the real application happens when you actively change the way you live your life.
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