Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life

I'm your host Corey Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about the inevitability of

discomfort when it comes to growth. More to come on that in a moment. First let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I'm going to start with a bold statement, which is that in order to grow you have to navigate this comfort.

I truly believe there's no way around this. I actually see it as the fundamental law.

I don't believe you need to suffer in life or at least create unnecessary suffering for ourselves.

And I do think we tend to fetishize pain as it relates to our own growth.

So I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the inevitability of feeling discomfort as you're going from one person to another.

And to become a person that has new habits, patterns, value systems, and just capacity to be in the world, to hold more, to experience more, to be more present.

This involves having to navigate new territory that is unfamiliar and therefore will feel on some level uncomfortable.

It will feel potentially unsafe for a period of time. It will feel confusing. It will feel like you don't have your old patterns to default to.

It requires expanding outside your familiar walls, experiencing new and unpredictable territory, and redirecting those old patterns that maybe you've relied on for a sense of safety and love to something different.

And the thing that is different, even though you might know, this makes sense in a deep way.

I know it to be right. We'll still feel scary to the nervous system.

And you can view it as a metamorphosis, as a deep alchemical shift that's happening.

And I think what we can get caught is that if we expect the process to feel the same way that we currently feel, then we're just going to get stuck.

We're going to sabotage our own growth, or we're just going to avoid the discomfort that comes with that process.

So more than anything, this is just a reminder that if you are feeling uncomfortable, again, it might be a sign that you need to change what's happening in your life or that you're creating undue pain.

But if you do feel like, yeah, I'm in a growth stage right now and it is uncomfortable, know that that is normal.

And I've never met anyone who's been able to bypass that experience.

So I guess the simple way to, and this would be to say, trust the process and trust your own, like a deep inner knowing that the path that you're on that's saying,

yeah, even though this is hard, there's a felt sense that I'm moving in the right direction. Trust that above all.

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