A Spell for Righteous Discomfort

Living in integrity with our values is uncomfortable.

Of course it is.

People who don’t share your values will judge you.

The dominating culture will punish you.

Righteous discomfort honors that. It says, Listen.

You are going to be uncomfortable either way.

So if you’re going to experience discomfort,

which discomfort do you choose?

The discomfort that comes with staying small

going along, and taking what you’re given?

Or the discomfort that stretches you and

expands you into being who you really want to be? 

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Mentioned:

Poem 133: The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

Make Magic:

Righteous discomfort works because we,

all of us, exist at choice. Always.

You can A L W A Y S choose to

reject the discomfort of conforming and giving in

and embrace the righteous discomfort of

being your whole, authentic, magical self.

Transcript: A Spell for Righteous Discomfort

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host, Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here. 

Hello, my love. All right, get ready for this one. This spell is a good one, I think. I've actually alluded to it before but it is especially helpful and important when it comes to living according to our values. So, last week's episode was a spell for living your values. If you haven't listened, it's a great complement to this one. 

I basically said in that episode that when we are living our values, we are attuned to what makes life meaningful for us; what lights us up; what helps us to be who we want to be and contribute what we want to contribute. Basically, I talked about how living our values is what helps us to make the most of this "wild and precious life." Thank you, Mary Oliver, for that beautiful phrase.

So, essential to that pursuit, essential to us living our values is what I like to call righteous discomfort. [laugh] Isn't that fun? I love that phrase, righteous discomfort. Because, here's the thing, being a human on Planet Earth is really uncomfortable. Yes, it's also delightful. It's also marvelous. It's beautiful and wonderful, sure.

And/but there is a lot of discomfort because we are always growing. And in growth, there is discomfort. We have to learn to be in new ways. We have to learn to navigate this world with enhanced perspective, with more power than we had before. Yeah? Our capacities expand. Our wisdom grows. And, as that happens, we are called to be in this world in different ways, and that's uncomfortable.

I mean, really, growth and change is uncomfortable for our brains because our brains would prefer that things stay the same, stay predictable, you know? But that's simply not who we, as human beings, are. We are evolving all the time, changing all the time, growing all the time, and there is a discomfort in that. 

So, something I love to say, and something I've said before here on this podcast, is if there is a situation where things aren't working quite right for you, it may be something that you've grown out of or it may be something that you are seeing with clearer and more critical perspective. Right? Here's the reality of it. There is going to be discomfort, no matter what you do. 

Now, you might be able to temporarily numb the discomfort. So, let's give the example of there's a friendship that you have grown out of a bit. Like, what you and this friend used to do together, it's not really fun for you anymore. 

Maybe the two of you used to complain and have these big bitch fests, and it used to be really great. But, now where you are, it's not really how you want to spend your time. It's not a way of being that lights you up anymore. It actually brings you down.

So, here you are in this friendship, and it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable because it isn't aligning anymore with who you are, with who you want to be, so that's uncomfortable. Now, it will also be uncomfortable to speak your truth to your friend. 

It will be uncomfortable to say, "You know, I'm really not here for this anymore. I don't like it. It doesn't feel good to me. Like, I love you, and I just notice that every time we talk, we end up just complaining the whole time, and that's not what I want to do."

That is going to be a really uncomfortable conversation. But I think that is righteous discomfort. OK. So, righteous discomfort is the kind of discomfort that takes you in the direction of your values. Righteous discomfort is centered around your desires, and is taking you in the direction of who you want to be rather than who other people want you to be or who you're expected to be.

I will tell you that there's a place I personally have been practicing righteous discomfort lately. So, one of the things I discovered—through working with a coach, because coaches need coaches too—is that I will tend to keep my opinion or my perspective to myself in certain situations. That may actually surprise you because [laugh] it surprises me. I am an outspoken person but especially in close one-on-on relationships, I have a harder time expressing my truth. I feel a greater need to protect the other party from what I really think or what I'm really experiencing.

And, listen, I come by that honestly. I am a woman. I am conditioned to put others' needs and others' feelings before my own. And I'm a white woman. I am conditioned to keep my mouth shut about the truths that I see. I am conditioned to maintain niceties and the appearance of peace where there is none.

But that's not who I want to be, and the more I grow, the more powerful I become, the more perspicacious I become, right? The more perspective and wisdom that I have, the more disruptive truth I want to share—of course. So, it has grown for me increasingly uncomfortable to keep my thoughts, my perspectives, my truths to myself, to hold them inside of me.

Ooh, do you resonate with that? Do you feel that? I wonder if you do. Do you swallow down your own disappointments and discomforts because that's what you've been conditioned to do? And I want to acknowledge, especially for those of you listening who are further minoritized and further oppressed by the dominating cultures, the pressure for you. Oftentimes, the requirement for you to swallow your truth, your discomfort, the disrespect with which you're treated, it is all the larger and beyond my imagining. 

So, however it is that you might resonate with what I'm saying, like, if you're like, "Ooh, yeah, I feel that too," or if you're like, "Woman, you don't even know" [laugh], like whichever way, I will just say that I've been in a place recently where I am choosing the discomfort of expressing my opinion, expressing my truth, expressing my perspective, like, getting it out of my own body and mind, rather than packing it in and shoving it down. That is an example of righteous discomfort that I want my one-on-one relationships with my family members, with my beloveds, with my friends, even with the people with whom I work closely, I want them to have candor.

I want to be able to be my whole self with my feelings and my thoughts and my perspectives and my opinions. I want to be able to want what I want, and to express that. I want to be able to see what I see, and to express that. I want to live in integrity in those relationships and, in order to do that, I choose the righteous discomfort of saying what's on my mind. I'm choosing the discomfort of having the conversation over the discomfort of not having the conversation. Do you see?

So, this one is pretty simple, my friends, the spell for righteous discomfort. It's, number one, acknowledging there will be discomfort either way. Right? We can only avoid and numb for so long before that becomes its own problem. And, indeed, that's part of what happened to me. I started having these headaches. I started having all of this pain in my body, and it was the pain associated with holding in the tension I was feeling rather than finding a way to let that tension exist outside of myself.

And I do have to pause there, and say I owe that moment of clarity to my own coach, Amanda Renee, who helped me to see and express that, yeah? So, oh, I wanted to tell you about this fascinating study that showed basically that people who choose avoidance—like I was [laugh]—people who choose to attempt to avoid discomfort, avoid suffering, was the way that it was put in this study, they actually never see a reduction in suffering. Like, that discomfort just perpetuates—of course, it does. It has nowhere to go.

Whereas people who are willing to be uncomfortable or, in the language of this study, who are willing to suffer, who are willing to feel negative feelings, and to be uncomfortable but in the service of living their values, they do over time experience a reduction in suffering. To me, this is not surprising because I know that when we are in the place of choosing who we want to be, when we are in the place of aligning with what our heart and guts and mind and soul are saying, we are more fully in our power to choose. And when we are in our power to choose, when we are trusting ourselves more and more to choose what feels right, when we build our capacity for righteous discomfort, we are moving in the direction we want to go. 

So, we're not stuck and stifled being who we don't really want to be. We are, rather, moving in the direction—courageously, uncomfortably at times—that we do want to grow. So, I can think of so many applications for this, and I want to give you just a few to get your own mind kind of sparkling and percolating on this.

So, one might be pricing, money. Like, you might be uncomfortable being paid too little but can't fathom the discomfort of asking for more. Look, you're uncomfortable either way. What are your values when it comes to compensation? Who do you want to be when it comes to receiving money for your work? What are the ways that your conditioning is asking you to behave, and what are the ways that you want to behave? And then what would it look like to choose righteous discomfort?

Another place this might apply is with your relationship with rest. Oh, my gosh, so many people—me included—find taking time off really uncomfortable. We block time. We maybe even block whole days or weekends or vacations because we know we need to rest. We know we need to recuperate. And, yet, having a stretch of time in which we are not being as we are expected to be and praised for being productive and efficient and hard-working, it can be really, really uncomfortable.

There's actually a metaphor that I use for this. It's like when you are in a plane, a jet plane, and the plane kind of slows down to land, and it glides down toward the runway, it's all fine and well. That's kind of like as you're preparing for the vacation, as you're looking at the calendar tomorrow, and you're saying, "Oh, lovely, tomorrow's my day off." But then that plane, which has been traveling so fast, hits the ground, and it's a little bit jarring. And then we have that stretch of time where we're thrown in our seats as the plane is slowing down.

To me, honestly [laugh], that's often what the first hours of a break day can feel like. That's what the first couple of days of a vacation can feel like. It's this like whoosh, this discomfort with slowing down. It's not like I just appear on a pool raft with a drink with an umbrella in it in my hand, and I'm fully relaxed. No, it takes me some time, and that time is full of righteous discomfort, let me be really clear. [laugh] 

As I slowly slow down, as I hit the brakes, and as I realize also just how fast I was going, I had no idea I was doing that much until I was doing nothing, and it felt so uncomfortable. Yeah? So, there are several examples of situations in which who I want to be, what I want to do is conflicting with my tendency. And my tendency generates its own kind of discomfort—not resting; undercharging; not speaking my truth in a relationship—and to be who I want to be, to make the changes required to be who I want to be also involves discomfort to speak my truth, to raise my prices, to take a nice long break. Yeah?

I love that this idea of righteous discomfort does not discount or deny that living according to our values is uncomfortable. Of course, it is. It honors that. Righteous discomfort sort of insists, listen, you are going to be uncomfortable either way. But righteous discomfort also asks you, which discomfort do you choose? The one that comes with what you have grown out of, or the one that stretches you and expands you into being who you really want to be? 

All right, my love, I would love to hear from you. You know you can always send me an email. It's on the contact form on my website. If you got to this podcast through an email I sent to you, you could hit "reply" and you could tell me where you are ready to practice some righteous discomfort. 

I'm excited for you, and I'm excited for us, because when we are being who we want to be, we are purposefully co-creating our human evolution. I know that sounds so lofty but I really believe that shit. That's how we best evolve to create the world that we want to live in. 

All right, my love, as always, thank you so much for listening. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. 

Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time. 

End of recording