Devon Hornby LMT, ABT
We are taught to seek comfort — to organize our lives around safety, convenience, and control. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But beneath it lies a subtle prison. Comfort can be claustrophobic.
When we build our world around what feels pleasant, we unconsciously shrink the field of our experience. The unknown becomes threatening, challenge becomes avoidance, and even small discomforts can feel unbearable. We begin to live in a smaller and smaller room, where the air grows stale and the walls of “what I can handle” close in around us.
“In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness – look at it, smell it, feel it – we find it is claustrophobic.” Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
This is how suffering grows in a life that looks peaceful from the outside. When our world becomes small, every ripple becomes a wave. A sore muscle, a tense conversation, an unexpected loss — all loom large because there is no spaciousness around them.
The paradox is that our attempts to feel good often make us fragile. We lose the resilience that comes from contact with life in its rawness — the weather, the body, the breath, the pulse of uncertainty that is the rhythm of existence itself.
In body-centered work, we see that health is not the absence of discomfort but the capacity to stay present within it. When we inhabit our body — not as an object to manage, but as a living field of intelligence — we rediscover the vastness that has never been lost.
The Awakened Warrior begins here: by recognizing that comfort, when clung to, becomes a cage. True peace does not come from avoiding difficulty but from resting in the boundless space that holds it all.