Veer-Zinda wrote: ↑Wed Mar 07, 2018 6:44 am
I feel strong aversion to doing anything that will be physically uncomfortable, even if it is beneficial to me.
I would like to start ridding myself of these attachments and aversions, and wondered if any of you have made progress in this area and how you went about it.
I can tell you what really didn't work -- and I mean really didn't work and backfired tremendously:
haphazard, random efforts to toughen myself up. Namely, I had at some point come to the conviction that I need to toughen up, physically. But I had made no plan how to go about that, didn't think things through, and just tried to use every opportunity to toughen up. For example, when carrying home a heavy bag of groceries, I insisted, on the spot, on carrying everything in one hand, even though I had an extra bag with me and could put half of the weight in each and carry one not so heavy bag per arm. Or on the way home, I remembered I need to toughen up, so I'd step off the bus one station earlier to walk home, without any consideration for what I was wearing that day or how heavy my bag was or at what time I was supposed to be home that day etc.. Or I didn't feel like making myself breakfast, and impulsively said to myself that going without breakfast is just part of my efforts to toughen up.
This was very stressful, it wore me out badly and made me more prone to easily give in to unskilfull desires for eating junkfood and watching tv, among other things.
The activities with which I chose to toughen up seem to be good ones per se and the emergencies I have thus re-created were realistic. But the context and the timing were bad, as far as training goes. Training should take place in a controlled or semi-controlled environment, with (mental) preparation before and reflection afterwards. Otherwise, it's not really training, but just haphazard masochism. And that's useless.
So my plan is to train with those same activities, but to do so more consciously, with more mental praparation. As in deciding a few days in advance, "This Thursday, I'm going to carry a heavy bag of groceries home in one hand only." This is, after all meant to be just training, not creating another actual emergency.