When is it time to push ourselves out of our comfort zone? It’s hard to know. I remember my friend dragging me to a real estate conference, and out of politeness, I agreed to go. The keynote speaker, a local developer, gave the standard boilerplate speech about being an entrepreneur: “Be hungry, take risks, etc.” It went on and on, and the room was visibly bored.
“Always push yourself out of your comfort zone,” he said, adding that he likes to go cliff-diving to discover his potential. I was tired of hearing this. It is something I have heard throughout my life. His talk made me ask, “Why are you doing this? Is it really helping you?” He still seemed rather nervous while giving a speech to a small room. Perhaps constantly trying to push yourself can actually make you more nervous.
A delicate flower
The talk bothered me, because I have often forced myself to do things I was uncomfortable with, which I later regretted. Just as often, though, I was happy I pushed myself.
I am not sure if this makes me more resilient. It may just prime my body for stress. If you are going out of your comfort zone, maybe there should be a good reason.
I started thinking about this again when my Daoism teacher, Amy, a headstrong, talkative businesswoman from Taiwan, told me about her early days of studying “The Way.” At the time, she had started to study Daoist teachings, but had never practiced. She would read, but then return to her busy modern life and forget what she was learning. She could feel that her teacher wanted to say something. So she said to them, “Go on, tell me the truth.” But they weren’t sure she could handle it.
Amy said: “Please, you treat me like a delicate flower in a warm room. But I don’t want to be a delicate flower. I want to grow to be a strong tree.”
They told her that she needed to practice more. And it really hurt. She cried about it. The story got me thinking again about what it means to be out of your comfort zone. I, too, would rather be a strong tree than a delicate flower. I also don’t want to be nervously bragging about jumping off cliffs, for reasons I can’t explain.
We can cultivate ourselves
You might be wondering why I am talking about Daoism in a mindfulness blog. Daoism has a huge influence on Zen Budismo, an ancient practice that influenced mindfulness. Zen Buddhism is known as Chan Buddhism in China. Chan (單佛) emphasizes practice over the studying of sacred texts.
Amy, a Daoist, introduced me to Chan Buddhism. She ‘forced’ me to read the foundational Chan text, the Platform Sutra, line by line, over many months—critiquing and elevating my Chinese in the process. She is a practitioner of ‘San Jiao He Yi’ (三教合一), which means “three schools as one.”
Those schools of thought are Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. There is a big connection between certain schools of Buddhism and Daoism, and they are also regularly taught together.
I am interested in Chan’s emphasis on practice in the world. Mindfulness and Chan both emphasize embodied practice. Chan’s renewed emphasis on practice is probably owed to Daoism, and to the political situation when Buddhism entered China. That foundational Chan book, the Platform Sutra, is about Hui-neng. He is a central figure in the Chan tradition, and was its sixth enlightened master. He was not a normal monk.
The regular monks of his monastery do not seem to possess real wisdom. They are too caught up with their status in the temple to come closer to the Dharma. In what’s really a funny back-and-forth, the head disciple of the temple tries to outdo Hui-neng, over and over. He stays up plotting, in the middle of the night, to write better poems than him.
Unlike the historical Buddha, Hui-neng is not a prince. He is very poor. When he reaches the temple, the enlightened master hides him in the rice mill, where he does gruelling manual labour. Nobody thinks he could have written this amazing poem that the jealous disciple wants to outdo. Chan criticizes temple life. It reminds us that we can cultivate ourselves in the world.
Thinking again about Amy, she describes this shift as moving from the “red robe time” to the “white robe time.” In the “red robe time,” the essence of Dharma was in the temple, but now, in the “white robe time,” it is in the world, among the ordinary people.
A strong tree
Amy tells me it is easy to cultivate mindfulness alone on a mountaintop. Nothing there will disturb your peace. It is hard to cultivate it in a city full of noise. If you come down from the mountain to the city, you will be able to handle it. Training in a harder environment does make us stronger, although I do think it’s different than forcing yourself to jump off a cliff.
The real things that push us out of our comfort zone aren’t daredevil acts. They are emails in the middle of the night, our responsibilities to the people around us and the unpredictability of modern life. To be able to handle those things is what it means to grow to be a strong tree.
A delicate flower needs a perfectly warm room and proper tending to stay alive, while a tree can handle being snowed on. Animals play around it, and it can live for 100 years with no one tending to it.
Ironically, the Chan tradition, which emphasizes experiential practice, has more scriptures than many Buddhist sects. Despite its critique of the monastery, many Zen and Chan temples exist, with many monks. Even though it is claimed that “whoever obtains understanding through reading will have weak vital energy (qi, 氣),” we shouldn’t stop reading, writing or spending time in warm mountaintop rooms.
This contradiction is to be expected. Reading and practice go together, with one influencing the other. We can still take away from the Chan tradition the importance of cultivating our prática do cuidado in everyday life, so that we, too, can grow to be strong trees with deep roots.
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