Evolving Magazine
A Guide for Conscious Living since 2009
Multi-Dimensional Mastery - May 2015 - Santa Fe
The Magic Beyond the Comfort Zone (Part One)
By Dr. Judy Scher
Most of us were brought up in an environment that taught us something very specific about what it means to heal. Break an arm? Have it set. Cut yourself? Cover the cut with a Band-Aid. Have an ulcer? Take antacids. Depressed? Take a pill. If you have a tumor, get it biopsied, and then have it cut out. These experiences and their corresponding actions are so common in our culture that the presence of an underlying message, of a whole way of seeing ourselves and the world, becomes almost invisible to us.
Beneath that simple experience of “have a headache, take an aspirin,” there is a message: If something feels bad, we must do whatever it takes to make the pain go away so we stay in our comfort zone.
But there is a difference between comfort and healing. Comfort means keeping things the same, not rocking the boat, maintaining the status quo. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with being comfortable, at times that is the most healing experience you can have. However, restoring comfort is simply resetting ourselves back to the moment before the pain started, so whatever conditions in our lives might have contributed to creating that painful experience are very likely still there. Nothing has changed.
True healing is about growth. Growth requires change, instability and reorganization. You can see how comfort and healing could go in opposite directions. Instability can be scary, reorganization requires energy, and change will definitely take us out of our ‘comfort zone.’
When we seek only comfort, a return to the status quo, we end up feeling victimized by our circumstances. My head hurts, my allergies are annoying me, my arthritis is debilitating, my back is killing me. Something is happening to us, and so we have no relationship with it. In this situation we do not see that we have any choice, we do not see the underlying messages. If we have no relationship to something, how can we impact it, how can we change it? We feel it is even impossible to simply be with it. What if you had it backwards? What if you are hurting your head? What if you are killing your back?
To choose to reorganize and change requires being present with the pain, the discomfort, the illness and the loss, so the energy from that experience can be liberated and transformed into wisdom. When we give ourselves permission to go through the ups and downs of whatever it is we are experiencing, we open up the myopic lens of seeing ourselves from the limited vantage point of being a victim – to recognizing the full and multi-faceted aspects of our existence. Even if you’re not consciously identifying yourself as a victim, you may still be acting the way a victim would act.
To heal comes from the Latin word ‘hale’, which means to become whole. When you are able to stay present with all that you’re feeling – the good and the bad – you learn to navigate into wholeness. Then you start to realize what would seem like a paradox, that good and bad are part of a continuum of life experience and may in fact exist seemingly at the same time.
Once we see the underlying message of our culture’s common concept of healing then we are able to have a choice—to continue to see pain or discomfort as something to avoid, or to see it as a chance to wake up into our lives. Imagine how this view could apply to any aspect of your life: Argument with a co-worker? Frustration with a boss? Car accident? Financial challenges? Cancer? Imagine if the focus you brought to those life events and experiences encouraged growth, presence, and exploration? It would require asking new and different questions, shifting our world-view from, ‘Why is everything so hard, and how can I make this stop?’ to ‘How can I listen to what this is trying to teach me and embody the wisdom offered?’ This is the magic that lies beyond the comfort zone.
Judy Scher, D.C. is Director of the Scher Center in Santa Fe since 1992. She is an international teacher, workshop leader, and keynote speaker. The Scher Center utilizes cutting edge reorganizational healing tools including Network Spinal Analysis Care. For more info go to www.HealingWithoutLimits.com
or call 505 989-9373.