Sitting With Discomfort: The Path to Real Discernment

The discomfort I feel while consuming information shows me the biases I still hold at some level. These biases prevent me from interpreting reality with the clarity I would like.

Sitting with discomfort is the only way I’ve found to actually see through my own filters.

Gut Is Not Enough

Feeling and intuition are not things we fully understand. Are our thoughts and feelings our own? Or are they responses to some external influence?

Many rely first and foremost on their gut, some instinct which shows them where to look next. But our gut is the result of many past experiences which filter our perception.

So is that gut instinct really something we can fully trust?

The Sign of Filtering

I know I am filtering information at an unconscious level when looking at one or multiple sides of a story still makes me feel uncomfortable.

That discomfort in not being able to hold multiple perspectives at once without discord is a sign that I am not perceiving as clearly as I could.

In these situations, I practice sitting with discomfort until I can read or hear multiple perspectives without feeling reactive energy or compulsive urge.

Balance Before Conclusions

I am seeking out a place of energetic and emotional balance before I draw any conclusions.

Discernment, for me, is about getting to this place of balance in my body and only then starting to connect the dots.

If I cannot see an opposing viewpoint without feeling triggered, then I am still operating from a place of cognitive bias.

Certainty May Be the Greatest Lie

When we operate with cognitive bias, we cannot trust our gut except to say that our gut is showcasing what we believe, not necessarily what is actually true.

It is incredibly uncomfortable to feel uncertain. That is why it is fun to latch on to whatever perspective feels good and provides some semblance of order.

But our unwillingness to find comfort with discomfort is the very thing preventing us from accessing real truth.

Becoming Comfortable With Confusion

When I am able to feel through the discomfort of holding multiple perspectives at once, only then can I trust that I am making a clear choice unfiltered by my past experience.

This level of discernment is incredibly difficult to achieve. I am not there yet.

That is an incredibly confusing place to live, but it is becoming less uncomfortable. And that confusion actually feels more honest than pretending I know what is going on.

Certainty may be the greatest lie we tell ourselves. It might be more honest to say: I do not know, but I am doing the best I can with the information I have been given, and I am open to being wrong about it all.