Sitting With Discomfort

One of the things that contemplative practice teaches, quietly and through accumulated experience rather than through instruction, is that discomfort is survivable. Not comfortable. Not something to seek out. But survivable, and more than that, something that can be present in awareness without requiring immediate action to make it stop.

This sounds like a modest skill. It turns out to be one of the more significant things a person can develop.

Most of the behaviors that undermine creative lives, and human lives more generally, are attempts to escape discomfort. The avoidance before a difficult creative session is an attempt to escape the discomfort of beginning. The shame storm behavior, the compulsive checking and the defensive messaging and the wanting to take back what was shared, is an attempt to escape the discomfort of exposure. The perfectionism that keeps work permanently unfinished is an attempt to escape the discomfort of being evaluated. The comparison spiral, once entered, is almost impossible to exit precisely because exiting it requires sitting with the discomfort of not knowing how you measure up, and the scrolling continues in the hope that the next piece of information will resolve that discomfort.

What contemplative practice develops, through the specific and repeated experience of sitting with what arises during meditation without immediately acting on it, is the capacity to be present with discomfort rather than automatically fleeing it. This capacity is not the absence of discomfort. It's the development of a different relationship to it.

What Happens During Meditation

In a meditation session, discomfort arises. This is not a metaphor. Physical discomfort arises: the knee that begins to ache, the itch that demands to be scratched, the restlessness in the body that says you've been sitting too long. Emotional discomfort arises: the anxiety that surfaces when the mental busyness quiets enough to let it, the grief that was being held at bay by activity, the low-grade dread that's been present underneath the day's momentum. Mental discomfort arises: the boredom, the doubt about whether this is worthwhile, the inner critic's commentary on the quality of the meditation, the intrusive thoughts that arrive with more urgency than usual precisely because you've tried to quiet the usual mental traffic.

The habitual response to all of these is to make them stop. Scratch the itch. Shift the position. Open the eyes. Check the time. End the session early. Follow the thought. Engage with the anxiety. React to the inner critic.

The meditation practice asks you to do something different. Not to suppress the discomfort or to pretend it isn't there. Not to white-knuckle through it with gritted-teeth determination. But to simply be present with it, to allow it to be in awareness without immediately acting on it, and to notice what it actually does when you stop trying to make it stop.

What it usually does, when you stop trying to make it stop, is change. The itch that seemed absolutely urgent tends to diminish when you don't scratch it. The emotional discomfort that seemed overwhelming tends to shift when it receives attention rather than suppression or escape. The boredom that seemed intolerable tends to reveal something underneath it when you stay with it rather than immediately filling it with something more stimulating.

This is not always what happens, and it doesn't always happen quickly. Sometimes the discomfort intensifies before it diminishes. Sometimes it stays present through the whole session without resolving. But the experience of being present with discomfort without acting on it, even when the discomfort doesn't resolve, builds something in the system that the habitual escape from discomfort doesn't build.

What Sitting With It Builds

The capacity that develops through the repeated practice of being present with discomfort rather than immediately escaping it is sometimes called distress tolerance in psychological contexts, and sometimes called equanimity in contemplative contexts. The terms point at similar things from different angles.

Distress tolerance is the ability to be in a difficult state without that difficulty requiring immediate action to resolve. The person with high distress tolerance can be anxious without immediately seeking reassurance. Can be uncertain without immediately seeking resolution. Can be uncomfortable without immediately seeking relief. The difficult state is present and they can function in its presence rather than having to make it stop before they can do anything else.

Equanimity is a related but somewhat broader quality, the capacity to maintain some stability of awareness across the range of arising experience. Not indifference, not the flattening of all experience into blandness. But the quality of being able to encounter what arises, pleasant and unpleasant, without being completely destabilized by it. The equanimous person is moved by their experience but not swept away by it.

Both of these qualities have specific and significant implications for creative life.

The creative life involves a great deal of discomfort that can't be avoided. The discomfort of beginning. The discomfort of the difficult middle. The discomfort of sharing work that matters. The discomfort of receiving feedback. The discomfort of rejection and the paradoxical discomfort of success. The discomfort of the fallow period and the creative drought and the loss of love for the work.

The creative person who can be present with these discomforts without immediately needing to escape them has access to a different range of responses than the one whose primary mode is escape. The discomfort before beginning doesn't have to be resolved before the session can start. The discomfort of difficult feedback can be present while the feedback is being heard and evaluated. The discomfort of sharing can be sat with rather than immediately responded to with the defensive behaviors that make it worse.

The Itch Instruction

There's a specific instruction in many meditation traditions that's worth describing because it's one of the most direct and practical teachings about sitting with discomfort.

When an itch arises during meditation, don't scratch it. Not as an act of self-punishment or pointless discipline. As a deliberate practice of noticing what happens when you don't automatically respond to the body's demand.

What tends to happen is surprising the first time it happens. The itch intensifies initially. It becomes more insistent, the demand to scratch it apparently escalating as if the body is surprised by the non-response and turning up the volume. And then, if you continue to simply be present with the sensation without acting on it, something shifts. The itch changes character. It becomes a sensation rather than a demand. It's still there, still uncomfortable, but the quality of its presence has changed from imperative to simply present.

This is a small and somewhat trivial example, but it teaches something about the nature of discomfort that generalizes beyond itches. Discomfort tends to escalate initially when you don't immediately respond to it. This escalation feels like evidence that the discomfort must be addressed immediately. But the escalation is often the last intensification before the discomfort shifts, the final demand before the demand becomes simply a sensation among other sensations.

Knowing this, from the direct experience of the itch and its resolution, changes the relationship to discomfort in other contexts. The shame storm that intensifies when you don't immediately act on it. The anxiety that seems to demand immediate resolution. The creative block that feels like it will never shift if you just keep sitting with it. These are versions of the itch, and the meditation experience of sitting with the itch and watching it change character is a direct preparation for sitting with the larger discomforts of the creative life.

The Difference Between Sitting With and Suppressing

The instruction to sit with discomfort is sometimes misread as an instruction to suppress it, to white-knuckle through difficult experience by refusing to acknowledge it. This misreading tends to produce exactly the opposite of what the practice is trying to develop.

Suppression is the attempt to prevent discomfort from being present in awareness. The pretending it isn't there. The pushing it down. The maintaining of a performance of being fine while the discomfort operates underneath. Suppression is effortful and tends to intensify what's being suppressed in the same way that holding a beach ball underwater requires continuous effort and tends to produce an explosive release when the effort fails.

Sitting with is the opposite of suppression. It's the allowing of the discomfort to be present in awareness, to be fully acknowledged and felt, while choosing not to immediately act on it. The discomfort is there. It's known. And you're choosing, for this moment, to be with it rather than to escape it.

This allowing rather than suppressing is what produces the shift described in the itch instruction. When the discomfort is acknowledged and present in awareness rather than suppressed, it tends to move and change and sometimes resolve in ways that suppressed discomfort doesn't. The emotional discomfort that's been held at bay by busyness and distraction, when finally allowed to be present during a meditation session, tends to move through in ways that the suppressed version doesn't.

The practice is not about being tough. It's about being present, which is actually harder and more useful than toughness.

Discomfort as Information

One of the things that changes when you develop the capacity to sit with discomfort rather than immediately escaping it is that discomfort becomes more available as information.

When discomfort must be immediately escaped, there's no time to ask what it's about. The escape happens too fast. The itch is scratched before you can notice what the sensation is actually like. The anxiety is resolved through reassurance-seeking before you can ask what the anxiety is actually responding to. The creative avoidance is indulged before you can ask what specifically the avoidance is protecting you from.

When you can be present with discomfort without immediately acting on it, there's space to be curious about it. What is this sensation actually like? What is this anxiety actually responding to? What specifically is the avoidance protecting me from? The answers to these questions are often more useful than the relief of escaping the discomfort would have been.

This is particularly significant in creative work, where so much of what produces difficulty is discomfort that's communicating something worth hearing. The resistance before a particular creative session might be protecting something worth protecting or avoiding something worth addressing. The discomfort in a piece of work might be pointing at something that isn't working or at something true that hasn't been fully said yet. The emotional activation around sharing might be indicating something important about what the work means and what's at stake in sharing it.

Sitting with these discomforts long enough to ask what they're actually about, rather than immediately escaping them, tends to produce more useful information than the escape would have.

The Long Training

The capacity to sit with discomfort is not developed in a few sessions of meditation. It's a long training, built through the repeated experience of choosing presence over escape in the formal practice and gradually finding that the choice is more available in informal contexts too.

The early practice tends to involve a lot of scratching the itch, metaphorically and sometimes literally. The restlessness becomes too much and the session ends early. The uncomfortable emotion surfaces and the eyes open and the attention goes somewhere else. The boredom becomes intolerable and the phone comes out. These are not failures. They're the early stages of a training that gets gradually more available over time.

What happens, over months and years of consistent practice, is not that discomfort stops arising. It's that the relationship to it changes. The discomfort that used to produce automatic escape starts to produce a moment of awareness before the escape, a moment in which the choice is visible. And sometimes, not always but increasingly often, the choice goes toward presence rather than escape.

That moment of awareness before the automatic response, that small gap between stimulus and reaction, is one of the most significant things contemplative practice develops. Not the elimination of discomfort. Not the elimination of the impulse to escape. The creation of a small space in which the impulse is visible and the response is, at least sometimes, chosen rather than automatic.

In that small space, the creative life changes.