The Body Seeks Ease

From time to time, the spirits ask us to embrace hardship—explicitly not just to grudgingly experience hardship, but to actively seek the enjoyment of it. There are a lot of ways they seek to teach us this. Sometimes they’ll prescribe a hardship.

Sleep on the floor is my current artificial hardship.

To some degree, obedience is a test of will. Will you do something uncomfortable when asked? When you’re laying on a mat on the floor, hips and shoulders aching, will you continue?

Sometimes the request is to hold off on eating.

Will you be hungry if you need to? Shaky, enervated, exhausted, stomach cramping with food in front of you: will you refuse to eat if asked?

Will you whine? Do you dwell in a display of your misery, compensating for the discomfort with the pity of others?

The spirits know what we’re capable of. Hardship is for us, to remind us what we can be and are.

It’s a lot easier to embrace discomfort if you remember that little fact.