The Essential Role of Comfort

To realise a goal, it serves to recognise the feeling of the desired result and proceed by nurturing that very feeling right from the beginning. Cultivating the feeling of the goal can be just as important as the actions taken towards it.

Many people aspire to a great dream of retirement but they often proceed amidst the discomfort of feeling too busy, tired and weighed down with responsibility. If there’s not much uplifting recreational contrast then the burdensome weight will establish the predominant tone. There’s a kaleidoscope of feelings available to us but if we limit our range, we limit our outcomes.

Feelings get patterned via repetition and we get good at the ones we practice. So if we don’t have enough experiences that bring joy and satisfaction, we don’t naturally align with them when life presents the right situations. In encountering a delightful situation or achieving an anticipated end result, it can be difficult to shrug off the old troubled state.

When the long desired retirement is secured, our feeling capacity will determine how we experience it. If we haven’t practiced playfulness, there will be a tendency to find new ways of become overworked. It happens on holidays as well. Sometimes it can take the whole vacation to actually unwind and begin to enjoy it. Or we’ll attract some kind of sabotage like bad weather for the whole time we’re away. Or bags getting lost. Or falling ill.

If we want to feel great on holidays and in retirement (and in all manner of unplanned opportunities), then we have to be familiar with knowing what great feels like before we get there. Expecting otherwise is like imagining that when we arrive in Japan we’ll automatically be able to speak Japanese.

If the day-to-day of working life isn’t alive with threads of pleasure and freedom, recreation won’t come easily even when it’s right in front of us. A great windfall will not last long in the hands of someone who has never practiced honouring their most precious heartfelt desires. The meeting of one’s soulmate will be fleeting and filled with disturbance for those who’ve failed to grow self love. Perhaps our inner depletion means we only have enough alignment for a one night stand and completely miss out on the marriage. If we don’t know how to feel good, good things will pass us by.

Feeling good takes practice and fluency can be learned.

We aspire to many different things in life: love, success, wealth, a home, meaning, purpose, family, friendship. Feeling good is central to these desires. The better we feel, the greater the likelihood of these good things coming our way. To that end, it serves us greatly to nurture our physical comfort as a foundation for feeling good. Our inner terrain acts as a kind of glue for experiences that match it. Our bodily alignment with feeling good, will welcome and allow more of the same.

Being physically comfortable is highly dependent upon our relationship with our body. Do we actually live in our body and experience life through our senses? It’s not unusual for many people to bypass the body and live almost exclusively from the mind. Early experiences of discomfort can lead us to largely abandon our bodies. We retreat into our head and adopt a thinking experience of life, rather than a feeling one.

Comfort supports a feeling of greater safety to settle into the body. An embodied orientation paves the way for more sensual depths. From a more relaxed place, it’s easier to connect with our innate instincts and intuition. Our discernment is improved as we more clearly recognise what does and doesn’t feel good and choose accordingly.

As we practice comfort we extend our threshold for pleasure. This vastly improves the likelihood of our goals actually feeling the way we want them to when we get there.

Some everyday things that accentuate physical comfort for me:

A cosy couch that allows me to nestle in and feel snugly embraced.

Soaking in the sun.

Ensuring that the temperature of both my shower and morning cacao are exactly the right degree of hotness.

Going to the toilet as soon as the feeling occurs to me.

Changing the music to follow my mood.

Sitting cross legged on my office chair.

Going barefoot in nature.

Flannelette sheets in winter. Sleeping naked in summer.

Two pairs of innersoles in my paddock boots.

Fresh air rather than air-conditioning.

A new pair of my favourite thick colourful woollen socks every winter.

Skinny dipping in the ocean.

Jeans that stretch enough that I can move however I like.

The visual pleasure of flowers and colourful furnishings.

Tending to the little things than can snag attention like mess, broken things or jobs left incomplete.

The right lighting.

Wearing clothes made of natural fibres.

It pays to listen and respond to all the small whispers for comfort. There’s no weakness in tending to these little longings for more pleasure. The more we choose it, the more it will choose us.