The Moment You Leave Yourself
Trying to feel better pulls you out of your experience
Most people use discomfort as a cue to leave themselves.
I can still feel it.
Standing in front of a room full of people going through chemotherapy…
knowing most of them were there for the same reason.
They wanted relief.
And I understood that.
But I also knew something that needed to be said right away:
“If we make feeling better the goal here,
we miss the point entirely.”
The room pulled back when I said it.
I understood that, too.
Because when you’re in pain, the instinct is to get out of it.
“Mindfulness isn’t an escape hatch.
It’s a compass.
It’s not for feeling better.
It’s for knowing where you are.”
I’ve taught this in many rooms.
And in most of them, people weren’t trying to optimize their lives.
They were just trying to get through them.
Addiction.
Chronic pain.
Bereavement.
Anxiety.
Different environments.
Same instinct:
“Make this feeling go away.”
But in every room, the same turning point appears:
The ones who stop trying to feel better
also stop avoiding discomfort.
And they stay long enough
to observe what’s there.
Pain.
Fear.
Uncertainty.
Met directly.
And over time, many do start to feel better.
Because it’s not your ability to be present
that disappears in difficult moments.
It’s your willingness to stay in the moment that does.
And you don’t need to sit in a room like that to see it.
Most of us are doing the same thing…just at a smaller scale.
Avoiding a conversation.
Reaching for your phone in the face of discomfort.
Trying to fix how you feel instead of just feeling it.
Different scale. Same pattern.
Most of us use discomfort as a cue to leave ourselves.
But the moment you try to escape your experience,
you lose your sense of direction within it.
Stay with it,
and it starts showing you exactly what you weren’t noticing.
Mindfulness won’t fix a difficult moment,
but it will help you stay oriented inside it.
Stay with it,
and you’re no longer lost in it.
That’s the compass.
That’s what I watched happen in that room.
Not people avoiding what they were facing…
but learning how to stay with it.
Recognizing where they’ve drifted from themselves
and returning.
Again.
And again.
Not to escape the discomfort.
To find their footing inside it.
What moments do you tend to avoid?