The truth is that if you can push into the discomfort, with love, and keep going … it’ll be an amazing breakthrough for you, an opening up of your habitual patterns. It’ll be a place of growth, of learning, of tremendous change. This is the kind of training that you need to put yourself in if you want to grow. Not a meditation retreat, necessarily, but any kind of practice that makes you want to retreat. It doesn’t have to be hardcore, just something that causes you to be uncomfortable, that causes your old habitual patterns to come up.

~ Leo Babauta from, https://zenhabits.net/purposeful/

Leo’s Zen Habits has helped me tremendously over the years. His was one of the first useful sites I found about 10 years ago when I started changing my life. The idea that hard work– not a retreat per se, but anything that makes you want to retreat– is exactly what I need to work on, is one of the pillars upon which I began rebuilding. When things start to crack– when I feel my grip on my reasonable demeanor slipping– it’s this idea which I try to pull up.

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