What does “No Comfort Zone” mean? It refers to that zone we all have wherein we prefer to reside, where we feel safe and relaxed. For most people, that comfort zone represents the immediate family, that neighbourhood, that small town (even if it exists within a city) where foreign influences are limited, and strangers aren’t readily tolerated, let alone welcomed. So why should this challenge exist? What should prompt the creation of a program to do away with this desirable state?
Because civilization today demands it. Material wealth is like beauty; it appears to be the goal in life, but it isn’t. The goal in life is to have a wealth of experiences that you’ve learned, studied, and explored in that life. It’s about the relationships you collect in your head. You will conclude this in your reflective journaling.
We don’t need people with guns, or super powers, or heroes in white hats. What we need are people who can connect the dots, who can make sense out of the world around us, and then proceed in the most logical direction. Leadership is implied, although leading isn’t the end in itself. It will be the facility, the ease of operating in almost any environment that will draw anyone to this mission. These are the soft skills employers look for. Such people have almost no small neighbourhood, no small town that they prefer to live in, because that narrow environment is far too stultifying, too boring. Not only will such people take on this challenge, it will be something they need to do.
How is anyone to take on this challenge? It’s all very well to say “No Comfort Zone”, but what does that mean in practice? It’s actually the battle cry of anyone who knows laziness is not natural or desirable, and that ree-laxing is acceptable in small doses, but not as a destination paradise. The No Comfort Zone means that at most times, you will need to be encountering some manner of newness on a regular basis. Money won’t be the motivator, but the gathering of fresh abilities and new skills will become a narcotic. It will be success earned that will drive the challenges.
Body Mechanics
Let’s get started. What follows are what might be deemed as the minimum requirement for relinquishing comfort. The opening demands of mind and body will serve as a starting point, although they don’t need to be the place to begin.
To begin with, we will consider the largely neglected requirement for our physiology, the greatest overarching consideration of the human body, namely that of walking. With walking, we will come to accept that for all that the human body is capable of, it has evolved to be a walking machine first. A great deal of our health is tied to walking. This walking requirement seems to be about 5k for 5 of 7 days, then a 10k walk, and finally a day of rest. For men, there is an added 10% to 20% more walking. All distances are approximations, and the sequence is arbitrary. This isn’t really negotiable to maintain good health. In order to help with this first priority, we will look at posture, and with it, meditation.
It’s a sad truth, but most residents in a retirement home are hunched over walkers. Posture is not recognized for its importance for the body, but even less so for the opportunity it represents for meditation. So what’s the big deal?
Good posture is a meditative mindset – learning and employing this discipline effectively eliminates stress from the body, and in so doing, eliminates a lot of stress from the mind as well. For example, employing the meditative posture discipline will permit a person having to stand in front of a crowd to significantly reduce their anxieties and permit them to proceed. This is called the neutral posture. It is a powerful skill.
Standing: Posture and Meditation
Let us consider the weight of the chest on the body. This weight represents an unbalanced load that we need to deal with every time we stand up. It tries to make us hunch over. Typically most of us pay no mind to this and simply use our neck and back muscles to hold ourselves up. If we consider the diagram, we can see that those muscles must be under considerable stress to hold us up because the shoulder is the point of balance (fulcrum).
Alternatively, we have the option of firming up the thorax/abdomen (front of the torso) which will similarly hold us up. This isn’t entirely straightforward; for one, we breathe with our lungs, which is in the thorax, and this keeps rising and falling with each breath. If we’re to hold ourselves up, we’ll need to address this cyclic interruption, by making breathing part of this posture.
How to do the neutral and meditative posture:
Stand up. We will now work our way gradually to this posture. Once you have experienced what we’re aiming for, you will be able to do this quickly. Slowly take a deep breath. As you do so, let your head and shoulders fall back as you fill your lungs. You will probably need to repeat this a few times before you have attained the posture. The psychological consequences may scare you a bit; achieving this posture makes you look and feel like you are in command.
Furthermore, women may also worry that their breast may look too big as compared to when they slouch, or that they may look too challenging, too intimidating, compromising any attempt at seeming compliant and desirable. As a gradual fix for the problem women may have, perhaps they can experiment with this posture when they know they are alone. Like this, they can see if the positives of meditative posture outweigh the fears they have.
Do not hold yourself up to this position by using your neck and back muscles alone! Yes, even with the meditative posture you will use a bit of your neck and back but now it is only for postural consolidation, to complete the relaxed posture. Employing your neck and back muscles in order to let your gut be relaxed is the last thing you want, even if you look like you are standing up properly. The paunch needs to go. The centre to your body will now be at your solar plexus – it won’t be tense, but it will be firm. You will now have lungs that operate by being comfortably full, and you let out some air in order to breath. What you won’t be doing is slouching with a largely collapsed chest, and taking in a bit of air in to breathe.
Even if you have excess weight, there will be a six pack (firm abdominal muscles) hiding under the weight. Finally, you will come to have a barrel chest comparable to what swimmers have, and unlike the six pack, that chest won’t be hiding.
If you’ve mastered the meditative, neutral posture, then perhaps we can begin walking. As simple as this sounds, you may find it a bit disorienting. Also, why is walking coming after standing and meditative posture? Because any walking is far more important than funny, and/or slouchy walking, so it exists as a priority. What would be a suitable gait to this meditative neutral posture? Perhaps you can experiment with Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. As it turns out, it is a slightly predatorial (think tiger) step, one that has a slight sneaky feel to it. This mildly predatorial/sneaky step is achieved by turning your hip toward the step you are about to make, and as you take that stride, the knee never locks. It won’t be apparent to anyone else, but that bit of spring in your step will work well with the posture. You will need to work at this for awhile – it won’t come second nature without practice. Here’s an instance where a role model would make learning this walk easier.
Finally, if you would like to take meditation and walking to the next level, you can experiment with running. Meditative running demands the greatest degree of meditative focus, and once such a runner overcomes the first 15 minutes of warm-up, they are entirely ‘in the zone’. It’s a terrific feeling.
A final word about physiology: While the necessity of daily walking can’t be over emphasized, there will be many (perhaps most?) that won’t comply because of the problem of laziness. Why is laziness a problem? Because the natural environment into which we evolved DEMANDED an effort to succeed. Couldn’t we free ourselves of such demands with the benefits of civilization? At the best of times, civilization grants us the opportunity to exist without stress or worry, but the physiology still demands the activity that is natural to our origins. For anyone disputing this demand, consider a similar one; the natural environment demanded of white and Asian races that there was the requirement of living in cold conditions, to the point where shivering takes place (think ice bath). Unfortunately, this cold ‘therapy’ is also natural, and without it we’re more susceptible to becoming obese. Shivering cold is unpleasant, but a natural part of many races existence. If the walking is seen as unpleasant, consider how much more unpleasant trying to live in a shivering cold environment was. And both of these states are entirely normal, natural. We make a huge mistake by living a life sheltered from such natural environment unpleasantness. Consider vegetarianism, or better yet, veganism. These plant dominated diets should prevail. There is far too much meat in our modern diets, and even this modest demand is spurned.
Bottom line: our physiology needs to be more compliant to our natural origins, or at least we need to simulate those demands (i.e. walk/go to the gym, eat less meat, endure cold occasionally, etc.).
Too much challenge already? If you’d really like to succeed, keep in mind that humanity learns by approximations; each attempt brings you successively closer to the desired state you wish to adopt. Hanging in there actually works.
Psychology
The first challenge presented was that of the physiological demands of our being. We will now look at the psychological. Remarkably enough, these demands are at least as important as are the physiological. Unfortunately, the conventional schooling we are all enrolled in as children is not particularly conducive to educating us, let alone exciting us about that knowledge. Too often, the draconian nature of present day pedagogy turns us off, and we’re hesitant to raise our hands to answer when the teacher asks the class a question. Mercifully, this antiquated form of awareness acquisition can be skirted by auto-didactic learning. What’s this? Auto-didactic learning, or self-directed education pays no mind to any manner of schooling curriculum; it is entirely open ended, and follows the liberated agenda that our roaming minds dictate.
The conventional education process finds little legitimacy in this manner of education, because the present-day strategy is that of collecting checkmarks and high grades from teachers, a very stultifying process. Is there another way? Of course there is; leave the student to dictate the field of study based on their immediate life-directed interests. This is known as heutagogy.
Now this makes the ‘course curriculum’ far broader than any school can handle (presently). This curriculum now includes life skills, civics, consumer economics, etc. In fact, this manner of schooling is an extension of the childhood experience, where a babbling newborn comes to be able to interface with a limited version of the world by 3 years of age. They do so through some explanation from the parents, then implications and repetition. This is orders of magnitude faster learning than sitting in a classroom, hoping the teacher is talking about something relevant, and doing so in a manner that forgives mistakes.
Now to make peace with conventional pedagogic teaching and self-directed education within this challenge: We have some very important forms of schooling that are still structured within the pedagogic paradigm, like engineering, law, and medicine, for example. In this challenge, you are on the hook to learn as much as possible (the no comfort zone), and that will include the conventional pedagogy as well as the lightning-fast self-directed education. You will need to do both. For that matter, you will need to take EVERY opportunity to learn, and most of that learning are the very events of a conventional life. However, instead of being pushed around like the human flotsam that those living in the comfort zone experience, you will be journaling and researching those events, trying to make sense of the world around you.
Back to the challenge: Given that the physiological challenge demands of a lot of walking, preferably with good posture, and people will need time for whatever time requirements existing school, employment, and family life may be, how does this psychological demand work?
It’s done on the run. Traditionally it would have been a pen, paper notebook, and whatever reading material you were engaged in, but today it probably will be some small laptop/notebook/cellphone computer. Such an item can hold both the notebook you will be writing in, and carry whatever subject text you are presently interested in.
As handy as the laptop/notebook/cellphone can be, it will require discipline to stay focused on your interests primarily. Perhaps the best way to do this is to restrict internet use, and certainly limit social networking – you are the focus of these notes and inquiries, and constant distractions will seriously cut into what little time you can make for your self-investigative writing. Remember that as much as any of us are part of a larger (social) picture, nonetheless it is the focus you give to yourself as you try to make your way through life that will teach you the many skills to succeed. And distracting Youtube or TikTok videos do nothing for that. Sorry.
There you have it; the full challenge of mind and body. As modest as this mission is, it will mature you, and in so doing, grant you insights into life that will streamline your existence. There are many more claims that could be made about how therapeutic this challenge is, but it would be better for the people attempting it to say so. And finally, your adventures can be shared on social media, but not at the cost of your own self investigations. Others adventures may be vicariously entertaining, but the blunt, sometimes harsh truths you will be investigating in your writing possesses far greater value. That manner of reflection is the highest quality, and gets you the furthest.
And don’t forget to walk.