Swedish Bhairavi Says: “Comfort Is Not Peace”

Most of us were consciously or unconsciously trained to seek comfort. We create lives and livelihoods based on obtaining comfort, keeping it, or increasing the comfort level.

This “training” is happening at any scale of living standard….from the financially poorest poor to the richest of the rich. Usually the whole day is spent on finding ways to be comfortable… adjusting the temperature, trying to choose what we want to hear, trying to avoid what irritates us, change the setting, mute the conversation, leave the room, order something else, find another method, another environment.

Much of this is actually practical, logical and useful. Comfort has its place. The body needs rest. We need safety, nourishment, warmth and ease. Most normal societies are built and shaped to maintain this as best as possible.

But is this what will bring peace? And what happens when the habit of seeking comfort enters a learning process?

And especially, what happens when it enters spiritual development? Learning almost always asks something of us that comfort does not.

If we have trained ourselves to experience discomfort as a signal that something must immediately change, a great deal of energy begins to move outward. We start to immediately defend, retaliate, blame and look for ways to rearrange the conditions. Perhaps someone else should speak differently. Perhaps the teaching should change. Perhaps the environment is wrong. Perhaps somebody is to blame. We twist and turn the situation, mentally and externally.

Sometimes the discomfort is very real. Sometimes it has largely been constructed in the mind. Most often there is probably some mixture of the two.

But something interesting can happen in either case. In our effort to regain comfort, we lose our peace. And during that whole time we feel uneasy, uncomfortable, the situation is unbearable, unacceptable and irritating.

The mind becomes occupied with the disturbance. The body contracts around it. We replay conversations. We defend ourselves internally. We spend time, emotion and sometimes considerable resources trying to make the outer world return to the arrangement in which we feel comfortable again.

Our peace then becomes dependent upon other people behaving correctly, the environment cooperating, our body feeling a certain way, and circumstances unfolding according to preference.

That is a very fragile kind of peace. In fact, what we often call peace in such moments is simply relief; the temporary easing that comes when an irritation, difficulty or unmet desire has been removed. The condition changes, the tension drops, and for a while we feel settled. But if that settled state depends on the next discomfort not appearing, it is relief rather than peace.

Many people think they will arrive at peace if they only fix the current issue that seems to have disrupted the comfort… hoping for it to pass so that they can be at peace.

Practitioners of Tantra gradually understand that they need to become spacious enough and abide in a different state to let peace exist and remain even when meeting an apparent discomfort, even when it is not solved.

Sometimes, when realizing that comfort-seeking limits growth, practitioners then think that it is a safer bet to swing to the opposite side. Then discomfort itself becomes the goal. Thinking that we have to live with low financial means or in scarcity or harsh situations to be at peace. Many people begin thinking that if comfort is spiritually limiting, perhaps difficulty must be spiritually superior, that we should just push ourselves harder, always choose what is unpleasant, endure more and seek intensity.

Bhairava ji has often pointed toward something subtler than this. The answer to attachment to comfort is not attachment to discomfort. As Siddha Tantra practitioners we are not trying to become uncomfortable people and suffering doesn’t become sacred simply because it hurts.

Instead of thinking one can play safe by being uncomfortable…one can start contemplating how much of one’s inner stability depends upon being comfortable?

For most people, if this is observed over time, we may discover that our flexibility is much smaller than we imagined.

There will naturally be comfort in life, and there will naturally be discomfort. There will be praise and correction, clarity and uncertainty, beautiful practices and difficult ones, periods where the mind feels open and periods where everything feels strangely resistant.

The Siddha mindset is not built by arranging life so that only one half of this remains. It develops through increasing capacity. The capacity to remain clear when something is uncomfortable. To with time recognize when action and rearrangement really is needed without turning every discomfort into an emergency.

It is strange that peace seems to require practice. Perhaps because peace asks for a capacity that relief never has to develop; the ability to remain internally available, clear and whole while life continues to move through comfort and discomfort alike.

What allows each practitioner to abide in that way will deepen through the journey. But we need somewhere to begin and a good place to begin is mantra.

To remain with mantra when the mind likes the moment, and when it does not. When practice feels beautiful, and when it feels ordinary. When circumstances cooperate, and when they do not. Slowly, something in us learns that it does not have to move every time comfort moves.

Perhaps peace begins there.

With love,
Swedish Bhairavi