How to Be With Intense Discomfort - Spiritual Lessons from Glastonbury
In this episode, I’m sharing the transformative experience I had during a full moon retreat in Glastonbury, England. Find out what I discovered in a very inhospitable forest on the Glastonbury Tor in the middle of an intense English heat wave!
We chat about:
What opened my heart in the middle of an aggressively uncomfortable forest vision quest
Ways we avoid feeling & why
How to build capacity for sensation
What really leads to pain and separation? (Hint - it’s not feeling more!)
The difference between embodiment and traditional spiritual practice
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Note: This podcast was originally recorded as a live video so the audio is not perfect!
Podcast Transcript:
Hey, my loves! Oh, it's so good to be back with you all for another one of our full moon chats where we dish about all things embodiment, somatic practice, feminine sensuality, eros pleasure, and all the good things in life.
During the full moon last month, I was actually on retreat in Glastonbury. If you don't know, Glastonbury is a highly energetic portal and mystical site in England, where there's a lot of divine feminine energy. There are ley lines, energy portals, and a couple of springs. It's a fascinating place known as the mystical Isle of Avalon, where many believe the Holy Grail is hidden in one of the wells. Glastonbury is a hub for spiritual and energetic activities, and I was on a tour there for three days during the full moon, which was a very intense experience.
The tour, called the Tor, is a massive mountain with a tower on top of it. It has been a mystical site for generations and has been inhabited and used for spiritual and mystical purposes by various civilizations throughout time. Glastonbury, especially the Tor, holds immense energy. During the retreat, we stayed at the house of people who actually live on the Tor. We spent three days there, fully immersing ourselves in the intensity of the energy.
I bring up this experience because there's something I feel compelled to share. During the retreat, we had an afternoon dedicated to a vision quest-like activity. The main purpose was to connect with the land and receive from it. We were asked to maintain silence. They provided us with herbal tea that had properties to open the third eye and heart, using local plant medicine. We participated in a small ceremony and then embarked on a pilgrimage up the Tor and into a forested area. The invitation was to find a place in nature that resonated with us and sit in silence with ourselves and the land, open to receiving any messages or blessings the land had for us.
Now, keep in mind that this took place in the midst of an enormous heat wave in the UK. England is not typically equipped for high temperatures. I've lived in hot places like Texas and Arizona, but those regions had air conditioning. It's a different experience in England when temperatures soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), and there's no air conditioning available to provide relief. There's nowhere to escape or find respite from the heat, even at night when it remained hot. Considering my Northern European ancestry and constitution, I really struggle in such extreme heat.
I don't like hot temperatures, so yes, we were hiking in the heat. We had been outside in the heat for a couple of days at this point, and we ended up in this forested area. The sun was intensely blazing down. I spent some time chilling in the forest, in silence.
During that time, I went through some things. I have to say, the first and biggest thing was how uncomfortable I felt. Here I was, supposed to be having a connected, deep, mystical experience, but all I could focus on was the physical discomfort.
I was feeling dehydrated, hot, and uncomfortable. It wasn't a gentle forest with a cute little cool, green patch of grass and shade, or a lovely stream. It was actually quite an aggressively inhospitable patch of forest with dense undergrowth, dead trees, and bark. I sat on a log for a while, and it was so uncomfortable with creepy-crawly things and constant poking from bugs. I felt uncomfortable in every way. I experienced the full range of sensations related to that discomfort.
I was meant to be taking this experience seriously, to really connect with the tree and receive its wisdom. But all I could think about was my water bottle, cushion, and yoga mat down at the bottom of the tour, under the shade tree, near the fruit trees. I longed to go back down there and make myself comfortable.
I went through the entire spectrum of emotions. There were moments of beauty, like the intricate patterns within the tree, mushrooms, and a butterfly. But there were also extreme annoyance, discomfort, and boredom. I felt a strong resistance and thought, "Why am I doing this? I don't want to do this."
So, I moved through all of these emotions and wondered if this was the purpose of the experience for me. Perhaps the invitation was simply to be present with it all. Could I be with the boredom, annoyance, and discomfort? I practiced opening myself up to allow these waves to pass through me, accepting that I was intensely uncomfortable for some reason or another. Can I just sit with it?
What I noticed was that our natural tendency is to remove ourselves from discomfort. We have various ways of self-medicating or numbing ourselves to alleviate those uncomfortable sensations. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. Do we want to be uncomfortable? Not really. So, it's understandable that we have these coping mechanisms. For example, when we feel bored, we often reach for our phones and browse TikTok or something similar.
A way of not being with boredom is to take yourself into this sensational realm of TikTok and distract yourself or numb yourself from the sensations of boredom that are present in your body. And the more we do that, actually what we're doing is desensitizing.
We're creating a pattern and a habit in our body of desensitization. We are actually creating more numbness because the truth of the body is that we can't just take down uncomfortable sensations and then expect to still experience more deeply the positive desirable sensations. What happens is when we take down the sensations on one side of the spectrum, our sensitivity to the sensations on the pleasure-positive side also decreases.
So we narrow our bandwidth of sensational experience in our body, just in general. And the more we do that, the more we kind of get stuck in this narrow experience of life, where we only open ourselves to a small portion because that's what feels comfortable, that's what feels easy on both ends of the spectrum. And actually, it's true that there are positive and pleasure sensations that we don't have the capacity or the tolerance for. And we actually have to try to get rid of them and take the sensation down on those too. So this is one of the reasons that we practice.
As well, and why I've become such a zealot of embodiment practice and really waving the flag of, we need to be doing this because this is one of the ways that we both build our stamina and capacity to be with sensation in the body and just create more of this opening to allow those sensations on both sides, on both sides.
So to elaborate on this a little bit more, I want to go back to myself. Let's return to Michelle in the forest, in this uncomfortable, aggressively uncomfortable forest. Let's go back to her. So I had this moment as I was doing this, you know, I was in this soup of sensation in my body and just kind of being with. Okay. That's what I'm doing. I'm just being with. Can I just be with this? And I suddenly had this moment of just heart-opening compassion for everyone, for people, for you, for just like all the people, all the whole world. My heart just cracked open because it just dawned on me. I just had such a knowing, a realization, and understanding of how much it is to just be in these bodies and how much like, how really uncomfortable it is sometimes and how much we are experiencing in these bodies. And yeah, I just had such a moment of compassion and just such a moment of like, of course this is hard, of course people are coping in the ways that they're coping because this is a lot, it's a lot to be with this.
And I, as a practitioner of this work, was struggling in a very low-threat environment in the forest, basically. Like, nothing bad was really happening to me. It was just this whole situation. But my heart just opened for all of us and just for what it really is to be in these bodies and also to be in this experience of separation, you know, of not experiencing this perfection and the oneness of the real, the eternal bliss, the thing that moves all things when we're able to connect to that. Of course, there is this very peaceful, expansive love, all of these kind of idealistic human experiences. We can touch those things, and they remind us of where we came from because, you know, I think the essence of our heart and soul is that it is inside of us. But when we come here to this human realm to have this human experience of all of these things, of being in the aggressive pointy forest, getting bitten by mosquitoes, of boredom, it
's almost like if you were an alien flying through space and you had never experienced boredom before, and you were like, "Oh, what is boredom? Let me go and check that out." Like, that sounds weird. And that's kind of us. We're like these cosmic beings that are like, "Oh, let me go find out what it's like to pay bills every month, let me go see what it's like to be hot and uncomfortable." It all just sounds like, "This is crazy, let me go have this experience." That's kind of on a divine cosmic level. But of course, we have to take care of our human too, and we're in the human as well as being this cosmic being who on some level wants to have all of this experience as well.
So how do we do that though? Like, how? I really think this is such a big part of my work and what I'm here to offer the world. It's like, how do we be in these bodies? Seriously? Look, this is a serious question that I have been confronting in my creative and professional life for myself, and also I think what I'm here to invite you into and offer you is just a more graceful way of being in these human bodies and being with all of this human experience and all of this messiness and boredom and discomfort and pokey forests and all of the things.
And the answer to how we do that is not actually desensitizing ourselves. That actually creates more pain because it creates more separation, it creates more alienation from ourselves. And that's painful. That's when we experience the deepest pain. So it's actually not becoming less sensitive and like taking ourselves out of it. It's actually developing more sensitivity to it and actually developing the capacity to be with it. I feel like I need to say there is no way out of this human experience other than death. Even then, who knows what happens then? But there's no way off this ride. We are just on this ride, and every spiritual practice, every personal growth thing that you do, none of them can really promise you, like, "This is why I react so strongly to this whole love and light paradigm because that is not happening until you leave the mortal coil." Like, there is no exit into, "Okay, now I've attained some level of that. I don't experience any of humanity anymore. I don't experience all that." To be in this human body, both the pleasure and the pain, there isn't. All that we can offer you with these spiritual practices, even the greatest spiritual practice, even the most enlightened master in a human body only experiences more grace and equanimity to be with all of this experience.
Even Jesus, right? In the 40 days, he suffered. Jesus suffered in his human life. You can read about it in the Bible. Jesus wept, Jesus cried out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" You know? And there are stories of other enlightened masters experiencing similar things. It's not that they didn't feel what it was like to be human; they just had more grace and equanimity.
That's what we're doing here with our embodiment practice—cultivating the ability to be with sensation, to be with ourselves, and to be intimate with ourselves. We're developing more capacity to be with all of this in a graceful and beautiful way, with more equanimity.
So, how do we do that? We practice. These are skills that most of us were not taught. They're not innate, although maybe they are when we're very young. However, they tend to be conditioned out of us by the culture and times we live in. We've lost touch with how to do these things.
Therefore, we need to deliberately prioritize this type of self-care, nourishment, and replenishment. We need to make time for it and be disciplined with ourselves (although I prefer the word devotion because it feels more beautiful and juicy). Devotion implies giving oneself over to something bigger than oneself. It's about cultivating devotion to self through our practice.
When you practice in community with others, even if you're not in the same physical space, there is a resonance and amplification that enhances your embodiment practice. It can speed things up for you. So come and join us, be in community, and engage in devotion and intimacy with yourself.
Start cultivating these skills to be with yourself in a more beautiful and graceful way. There's so much more I could say about these topics, and I'm looking forward to continuing to share my passion and the profound ways in which my life has shifted.
We don't fully know what will shift and open for us when we engage in these practices. That's part of the process and the beauty of exploration that awaits you if you choose to show up for it. Consider this an invitation to come and practice. I would love to hear your reflections, feedback, and any questions you may have. Sending you all so much love.