In Common Light

When I first started practicing yoga, I was a bit surprised when I first heard the common saying from the instructors: “Do what feels good, do what feels right.” I asked myself “Really? Doing what feels right can help my physical and mental health? It doesn’t require something super difficult, strenuous, or hard?”

I thought that yoga was beneficial only if you held the most difficult poses, stretched the longest, most painful stretches, and meditated for a very long, boring period. This sense of surprise in me, and the belief that feeling pain is the only way to make progress, comes from capitalism and western society. 

The approach to making progress personally and societally requires listening to our inner wisdom, not forging new solutions that we haven’t yet seen. To listen to your inner wisdom is to recognize our current culture’s misalignment, which leads to healing yourself and thus others. 

Pain as the Only Way Towards Progress

Where did I get the idea that pain is the only way to make progress? 

Western society paints pain as the ultimate good. Hustle culture tells us that a good life, an admirable life, is one that starts at 5am and ends at 8pm. A good workout is only one that ends in sweating, one where you push yourself to the limit. It is seen as a flex to be “getting through the day” on little sleep.

In Eric Fromm’s book The Art of Loving, he describes that the idea that progress is painful, through the act of discipline, is from Western culture. “It is one of the unfortunate aspects of our western concept of discipline… that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful and only if it is painful can it be ‘good” (pg.103).

In order to be sustainable discipline must be agreeable (pg. 103). Despite the difficulty, if the discipline is overall positive, we can come back to that behavior over and over again.

The Evolutionary Benefit of Pain and Pleasure

Listening to our inner wisdom — what feels good — is evolutionarily advantageous. Because evolution favored those who survived, the body is tailored in a way that what feels good means we are doing something right, and vice versa.

Pain is the body’s signal to change something. In alleviating pain, we usually fix something that poses a threat to our survival in some way. Evolutionarily, those who naturally listened to pain took the necessary action to stay safe. Consider taste aversion, and classical conditioning such as learned avoidance as evidence for evolutionary adaptations to survival threats that began with pain. 

On the flip side, pleasure evolved to increase the likelihood of survival. We are more likely to behave in a way that feels good. For example, dopamine, the “pleasure hormone” , is released during behaviors that increase the likelihood of survival – when we have a conversation, when we eat food — or the passing of our genes — when we have sex. This positive feeling encourages us to engage in these practices more.

Culture Depends on a Narrative of Natural

Because culture is arbitrary, its existence depends on people agreeing upon it. (Consider language, we only call a chair a “chair” because we agree. A $100 bill can be exchanged only because we agree that it holds this level of value.)

We think that we are currently living in alignment because the survival of culture depends on the assumption that it is natural. Thinking that we already are at the most natural state assumes that our problems require creating new solutions, instead of fixing old mistakes or patterns. Thus, our culture assumes that we have to invent something new instead of returning back to alignment.

Consider the complain that Gen Z employees call out sick for mental health days more often than older generations. Because Gen Z is more aware of the tools to return to alignment (mental health awareness), we are taking it more seriously, and defy our current system of capitalism.

If we think that the patriarchy is natural, consider the fact that men experience heightened pressure to succeed, and women feel put down when they hear they cannot enter politics. We would not feel negatively if the patriarchy really was natural.

We need to recognize that a lot of our problems exist because our society is very much misaligned from our natural state of being. 

Living on Autopilot

When we live in conformity to culture, we fail to recognize how the culture hurts us. When we internalize lies that we have to be a certain way or fit a certain mold is how we cause ourselves the most suffering. 

As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk said in his book The Body Keeps the Score: 

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”

Because the existence of a culture depends on assuming its ways are rooted in nature (“It’s just the way things are,”), most of us live life on autopilot, never questioning if our lives could be better if we stem away from the culture. If we find the real truths. And usually, we do this by finding alignment. 

When we are aware of problems, when we listen to our inner wisdom, we can heal individually, then heal from how we have been affected by the culture.

Finding Alignment

What exactly is alignment? Now that we understand that culture realities are not always rooted in natue, how can we first-handedly feel what alignment is, and thus the culture’s misalignment?

I started to find alignment, or a return to my most healed state, when I practiced spirituality, yoga, meditation. It was after feeling these benefits that I realized that I had been living out of alignment. 

When you get to a place where you are “healed,” enough, you start to realize that a lot of your problems come from society. Sometimes, your conversations in therapy become stagnant. It is then that you start to question cultural impacts, and then stem away from the cultural narratives and norms. 

Stemming from the culture is beneficial because you can live on your terms. As existential philosopher Rollo May says:

“Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, ‘This is me, and the damned world can go to hell.’”

Resisting What Feels Best

What if we do what feels best, but notice that we still have pain and problems? Usually, when we resist what feels best, either is fear involved, or we lack all of the necessary information to solve our problem.

Sometimes, what ultimately is best for us doesn’t feel great at first. For example, when we start going to the gym for the first time in years, it is hard at first, but as we keep going, it becomes easier and we enjoy it.

Notably, getting through discomfort exposes the misalignment we have been living in. Similarly, pain sometimes is purifying or detoxifying something from our past (you have to feel it to heal it).

Here are some starting points if you want to return to alignment

1. Uncover limiting beliefs from childhood that are holding you back from feeling love.
2. Start meditations, yoga, or somatic practices to get back into tune with your body.
3. Start habits that are healthy for your nervous system.

The Perceived Overwhelm of Finding Solutions

Finding solutions does not require forging an innovating that we have not yet seen (much like business people would do). This is why the idea of solving individual and societal problems may seem overwhelming and daunting. This overwhelm is eased when we begin listening to our inner wisdom.

Final Notes

The assumption that we already live according to nature, and that therefore solving our problems requires new innovations, simply exists to keep current cultural narratives alive. Since we are not living naturally, solving our problems means coming back to our alignment, the way that humans were meant to live, first individually and then collectively.

References

Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. Harper & Row. 

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma: Key takeaways, Analysis & Review. Instaread.