Sitting in Discomfort

It’s a grey cold morning with a chill to the air and a feeling of autumn.

I place my foot into the water and slide in until I’m up to my thighs in cold water with my toes squelching into the mud.

I breathe deeply, my breath forming mist in the cold air. Here I stand for a few seconds as my mind starts to tell me it's horribly unpleasant. 

I focus on my breathing, taking slow gentle breaths in through my nose. 

It would be easy just to stop here half submerged in cold water, my legs have become accustomed to the cold now and don’t feel it, but the wind is making the rest of me cold. 

I take a deep breath in and as I bend my knees and drop into the cold up to my neck.

I breathe out slowly. 

Now my skin is prickling, my breath has sped up and my body is objecting. 

There are two options now, get out and warm up, escape from the discomfort, or just surrender to the feelings, to the cold. 

I choose to surrender. I steady my breath. I relax my body. I quiet my mind. 

Two minutes in the cold and my body adjusts, it becomes familiar, comforting even. This only happens if I surrender to those feelings, if I resist it and try to keep busy, numbing the discomfort it just gets worse until it shouts so loud that I get out shivering. 

But when I surrender, a calmness comes over me and I feel totally alive. 

Cold water and the ego do not coexist well, so now I have relaxed for two minutes, I listen to my body, my fingers are telling me they’ve had enough. 

Time to get out. Emerging from the water, the air is cold and as I towel off and fumble to put my clothes back on, I can feel the cold has seeped right through my whole body, but I feel fresh and alive and amazing. 

I have a huge dopamine hit scorching through me, making me feel like everything in the world is incredible. I wrap up warm and sip some hot tea. 

I learn so much from my time in the cold water, we live such comfortable, convenient lives these days that we do not put our bodies through that nourishing experience of intentional adversity very often.

Learning to surrender to the cold has taught me to do this in other areas of my life too and allows me to get through times of adversity without having to resort to the distractions that we have so much access to in modern life.

I invite you to try some intentional adversity, you can learn so much if you just sit quietly and observe without judgement what comes up in a moment of discomfort.