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Today’s guest post is excerpted from Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less by April Dávila.
As human beings, we’re evolutionarily programmed to avoid discomfort. We prefer weather that isn’t too hot or too cold. We default to social circles that allow us to remain in our comfort zones. We shy away from the sharp edges of heartbreak and the shadowy corners of fear. Life, in many ways, is an exercise in evasion, avoiding anything unpleasant while seeking the warmth and safety of the familiar.
But as writers, we don’t have the luxury of shying away from discomfort, because conflict is the very essence of story and conflict is uncomfortable. If you want any chance of capturing conflict on the page, you have to train yourself to sit with all of life’s difficult emotions.
So how do we do that?
By sitting perfectly still, even when it’s uncomfortable.
First, the science: Research suggests that emotional pain activates roughly the same areas of the brain as physical pain. This explains why intense emotional experiences like a broken heart can feel physically painful. As an added bonus, emotional pain (think something like social rejection) can be rehashed over and over with a fresh sense of immediacy that generally isn’t present when you recall physical pain. For example, I can remember that time I broke my arm without feeling the sharp torment of it all over again, but if I think back to a falling out I had with a friend, there might still be tears.
But here’s the cool part: because of the way our brains are wired, you can build your tolerance for emotional discomfort by training yourself to sit with minor physical discomforts. This is a powerful practice for anyone, but for writers it has another layer of utility. Getting comfortable with discomfort allows you to write into all kinds of situations that might otherwise make you too uncomfortable to be with.
A note on self care (please don’t skip this part)
Before I share the specific practice you can use to build your tolerance for discomfort, it’s critical to touch on self care.
Since the early 2000s, there’s been a surge in scientific study around meditation, and it turns out that adverse effects are not rare. A 2022 study showed that over 10% of participants who engaged in regular meditation experienced adverse effects including anxiety, re-experiencing traumas, and emotional sensitivity. Childhood adversity was associated with higher risk, but was not required.
Because there’s a one in ten chance you might experience some negative effects, we should talk about it. How should you deal with it if you find yourself feeling anxious or triggered? In short: stop. End the meditation. Talk with someone you trust about the emotions you’re experiencing and then come back and try again when you’re ready.
Pushing through when discomfort edges into pain is an excellent way to traumatize (or retraumatize) yourself and nobody needs that. It certainly won’t help you with your writing. Even if you don’t open old wounds, pushing too far past discomfort will almost certainly prompt your subconscious to shift into protective mode and the next time you set the intention to meditate, your brain will compel you to do something else (anything else) instead.
To the over-achievers out there, please note: the essence of this practice lies not in the extremes, but in the subtle art of nudging your boundaries (ever so slightly) to foster growth and resilience over time. So please, for the love of Shakespeare, just go slowly, and if you find yourself consistently overwhelmed by emotion every time you sit down to meditate, I highly recommend that you enlist the help of a professional.
All that said, let’s give it a try.
Getting comfortable with discomfort: stillness practice
The practice I teach for getting comfortable with discomfort is sometimes called Stillness Practice or Formal Practice. This practice builds mental strength that, when applied to your writing, enables you to write even the most difficult scenes.
Meditation: stillness practice
Keep in mind that this is not about enduring pain or extreme torment. It’s about exploring the boundaries of your comfort zone with curiosity and kindness. Go easy.
- Begin by finding a comfortable place to sit.
- Set a timer for 5 to 15 minutes.
- Close your eyes if you wish, and allow yourself to settle. Take a few deep breaths. Connect with your body, feel its weight and presence. Choose an anchor for your attention: your breath, a sensation in your body, or the ambient sounds around you. When you notice that your thoughts have wandered, just let those thoughts go and come back to the anchor.
- Now add a deliberate practice of stillness. Once you’ve settled, try to remain as still as possible, resisting the urge to scratch an itch, adjust your posture, or engage in any other movement. Sounds easy enough, right? It’s actually quite challenging.
Sit as still as you can until the timer goes off, or until discomfort edges into pain.
When you feel the need to adjust, first ask yourself: Do I really need to move, or can I sit with this? Notice if the uncomfortable sensation shifts as you give it your attention. Begin to learn the difference between a nuisance that can be observed and pain that should be alleviated. If you reach your limit, by all means move (please take care of yourself) then come back to stillness and begin again. But hold out as long as you can.
My teacher, Jack Kornfield, tells the story of a time when he found himself sitting with a terribly itchy nose. He didn’t scratch it, and it just kept getting more and more itchy until he thought he might die if he didn’t scratch it. He finally surrendered to the fact that he was going to be the first person ever to die of an itchy nose and then, lo and behold, he survived. The itch passed, as do all things.
How this practice can help your story
Not long ago I worked with a client (a talented poet turned fiction writer) who was working on a novel about a Black family living in the late 1800s in the American South. The historical context offered fertile ground for conflict, rich with the potential to explore themes of injustice, resilience, and transformation. But every time something terrible happened in the story, they would skip right over it. They’d jump to months or even years after the event and have the characters reflect back from a great emotional distance.
Their reluctance to engage directly with those painful moments is a common challenge, especially with new writers. It’s perfectly natural and understandable. But this avoidance fundamentally alters the reader’s experience. By leaping over periods of strife and summarizing them after the fact, a writer effectively distances the reader from the characters’ emotional journey.
For instance, imagine you’re in a car accident on your way to work. When you tell your colleagues about it a few hours later, the story will be rich with details and emotion. You might be enraged at whoever was at fault, or blame the heavy rain. It will likely be a long story, and it will reveal things about you as a person as you describe how you handled both the crash and the aftermath. Now jump forward five years. That same event, with the passage of time, has likely been reduced to a few words: “Some jerk sideswiped me on the freeway.”
When you tell a story from a distance, it’s much harder to convey the full emotional impact of it. But when you become an expert observer of emotions and can stay with them long enough to capture them in words, there’s no story you can’t write.
Learning to sit with discomfort on your meditation cushion will allow you to write scenes that make your readers cry, or rage, or lock the doors. That’s powerful. And it all starts with simply sitting still.
