Big trips. They shake things up, shift our perspectives, and push us out of our comfort zones. They are thrilling, eye-opening, even empowering.

But they can also be uncomfortable.

And I think that when most people talk about travel, they forget to emphasize that discomfort. Instead, we wax poetic about our empowerment. It's all very inspiring, but I think it's important to convey that it is often our discomfort that leads to the thrill in the first place.

On December 27, 2018, Jaren and I boarded a plane for Mexico City. We had a five-hour layover there which I'm declaring MEX the world's coldest airport, by the way) before taking off for Santiago, Chile. We landed in the evening, stayed at a (very nice) Holiday Inn at the airport, and woke up at 4am the next morning to catch a 3-hour flight to Punta Arenas—a town that is so far south it could practically be Antarctica. From there, we hopped in a van and drove 3 hours north to Puerta Natales, our final destination in Patagonia. Why not just fly to Puerta Natales? Because the airport is so tiny, it's only open once a week. So we, and most of the other travelers we'd meet, made the extra trek to Punta Arenas.

By the time we made it to our hotel—a beautiful lodge overlooking a series of river channels known for luring in early explorers searching for the Magellan Strait—we had been traveling for 36 hours.

So we decided to eat lunch and go for a 3-hour hike.

This was the general rhythm of our journey. Having only a week to explore the wide-ranging landscapes, we were determined not to waste any time. I finally understood the expression, "We'll sleep when we're dead." I contemplated this expression a lot, actually, because it struck me how I'd always thought that expression was so stupid. Probably because I'd always heard it being used to justify things like 'working late,' or powering through something that drags you down. No, I thought, that expression is wasted on anything that doesn't light you up.

And this landscape lit me up.

But! Let's rewind to the discomfort for a second.

I had been dreading the air travel aspect for months. 48 hours before we left, I'd find myself panic-crying in the shower, unable to shake the anxiety that twisted like laundry, wringing out my gut.

We were flying on airlines I'd never flown to a part of the world I knew virtually nothing about. What would the air regulations be like? What was it like to travel to such a remote location? What's the government like down there? How friendly are the people? Would we die in a plane crash? And if we did, what would happen to our dog? Would anybody love him like I do? Would he have a good life? Would this trip have been worth it if we died trying to get there? By worrying about it, am I accidentally willing it to happen? Why can't I stop feeling this anxiety? Why can't I be more like someone else? I've traveled all over the word so. many. times. Why is this trip freaking me out? Why can't I talk myself down? — these are the thought-spirals of an anxious person who is very much ashamed of being an anxious person.

I worked very hard to hide this from Jaren. This was, after all, his bucket list trip. His excitement was palpable. And it's not like I wanted to be anxious. Nobody wants to be anxious.

For a while, I tried to cut the anxiety by talking about it openly. I tried to make a joke of it, mocking myself for over-thinking. If I talk about it, I thought, it will cut the intensity. And if I'm openly self-aware and even self-mocking, it might annoy Jaren less.

This worked to a degree. Voicing my anxiety did relieve some of it. But it also allowed me to ruminate in it more. And despite my effort, it still seemed to bother Jaren when I joked about it.

Finally, about 6 hours before we left for the airport, I sat on my bed and surrendered. When Jaren came in to ask why I was being so quiet and reclusive, I was shaking. And then, finally, I took a deep breath and found clarity in the moment; clarity I wish I could have had weeks, even months, earlier. I told him that while I recognized that my brain wasn't responding to reason, and I knew everything was going to be great, I just needed to feel into it for a minute and for that to be okay.

I needed to release the shame around what I was feeling... by being present with what I was feeling.

Jaren was kind, and he was comforting, and perhaps even more important—I was kind and I was comforting to myself. Within minutes, the panic passed. By the time we got to the airport, all remnants of it had practically vanished, aside from the standard excitement-induced jitters.

After arriving in Puerto Natales to one of the most spectacular scenes I've had the good fortune to witness, I reflected:

How have I, this person who believes there is no reward without risk, and who lives for the celebration of optimism and gratitude, become the kind of person whose brain grasps for any reason to stay within her comfort zone?

Have I changed? No. But where I may have grown more comfortable taking certain risks, I have grown out of practice with others. We are all in a constant state of change and growth.

Compassion, compassion, compassion.

It took compassion for me to release the shame around feeling anxious. It took compassion for me to ask for the space I needed to process it. And it took compassion to recognize—even in the aftermath—that none if it meant that I'd somehow grown 'weaker' than I'd been before.

The upside to discomfort is the pride you feel when you push through.

That first hike through the meadows of Patagonia—crossing streams, climbing hillsides, sampling wild berries, walking up to one of the most untouched and ancient-looking waterfalls I've ever seen—was so much sweeter because it was laced with the feeling of freedom that arises when you push through discomfort. (It's also called adrenaline, in some cases.)

We enjoyed the rest of our experiences with ease. A day spent on a high-speed pontoon boat, zipping through high winds to view various glaciers sprinkled along the shoreline. Another afternoon on horseback—again facing high winds, and again working our way up hillsides and through meadows that lead to epic overlooks, seemingly untouched for the better part of a millennium.

But on the third day, we'd planned a hike to 'the base of the towers.'

It's an 11-ish mile trek during which you climb from an elevation of about 440ft to 2800ft—of which the final half mile is a steep, rocky stair-like climb to the summit. The summit offers a view of the three towers, three massive granite rocks, for which the national park, Torres Del Paine, is named. All in all it takes about 9 hours to complete, round trip.

The night before, anxiety started creeping back into my consciousness. You aren't ready for this. You're barely a hiker—why, for your first real trek, are you taking on THE ANDES? Who says you deserve this, when so many other people—people who have hiked their whole lives and dreamt of this hike—deserve it more? You're not even grateful! And what if you can't do it? What does the trail even look like? What if there are steep ledges that you could easily slip off of? What if you look like an idiot?

What if. What if. What if.

I coincidentally (or not-so-coincidentally?) brought a book with me called, "I Don't Want To, I Don't Feel Like It," which discusses—from a Zen Buddhist perspective—how and why our egos resist change.

As I felt my anxiety growing, I picked it up. And happened upon this excerpt:

"How I feel" often dictates what we do. If I'm feeling lazy, I don't go out for the run. If I'm feeling tired, I'm easily talked out of meditating. If something feels hard, I feel justified in procrastinating.
All kids of "unpleasant" sensations lie beneath "I don't feel like it." The sensations themselves are not actually unpleasant, but they've been labeled unpleasant because the stories associated with them are dread, discomfort, worry, anxiety, fear...
We're conditioned to avoid those sensations; we've learned to retreat when we feel them arise. Over time we're trained to withdraw from situations that present even a slight possibility of those sensations being triggered. We learn to choose what feels like alternatives to the discomfort associated with the sensations, believing the stories that avoidance means we'll be safe and feel okay.
For most people, "I don't feel like it" is a constant, invisible barrier of resistance. We encounter the barrier and we're stopped from moving forward with our intention. We fall back into old, familiar, often suffering-producing, self-hate reinforcing patterns of behavior. [...]
We move from being present to the sensations in the body to being in [the] conditioned mind. (obsessing, comparing, creating stories and illusions of how it should be different)

[...BUT!...]

When we stay with sensationsthat ego-identity labels as "uncomfortable," we have a radically different experience. We might recognize "I'm feeling depressed" as merely low energy, rather than something wrong and painful that needs to be avoided at all costs. Anger can be experienced and consciously expressed as a state of high energy, instead of something that needs to be suppressed.
[...]
We can learn to experience the full spectrum of sensations and emotions available to us in healthy, life-affirming ways.
— Cheri Huber and Ashwini Narayanan

IN OTHER WORDS: when you allow yourself to sit with your sensations without judgment, you release yourself from the stories and allow yourself to FEEL.

And the feelings, themselves, are not that scary.

Note that ruminating in your discomfort and experiencing its sensations is different. When you ruminate, your brain is spinning. When you 'experience the sensations' your mind is still—you are present and you are simply noticing your feelings without naming them. It's meditation in action.

The book goes on to talk about time: specifically how when we worry, we aren't living in the present moment, but 'living in the experience' of a made-up future. This is a Buddhist tenet of which I'm very familiar, but we all need our reminders. And I needed this one.

So I decided to take a page from the book. Rather than allow my self-doubt to build up, I would choose to approach this hike 'in the present.'

I should mention that I also got excellent advice from my cousin, Erin, a far more experienced trekker than I. She not only reiterated the message from the book—to take it all one step at a time—but she reminded me to lean into the power of nature.

"There's a thing," she said, "called 'leaving it on the mountain' that I think you should try. It's about the struggle to the top, or when you're mentally grappling with something in your life—and at the top you leave it there. The mountain can take it, whatever it is you have. The mountain can withstand it. And take it from you. And you can leave it there."

DO YOU HAVE FULL BODY CHILLS? Because I did. She went on:

"It's not like you're 'getting rid of' something, which I think doesn't work, but more like you're leaving it to a stronger power. And what an incredible experience to practice that in one of the most powerful mountain ranges in the world."

That solidified it for me. I was taking my Buddhist book and my cousin's powerful, spiritual encouragement (sorrynotsorry to put you on blast, Erin) and I was going to take my angst, my anxieties, my self-doubt, and leave it all on the mountain.

When we got to base of the trail, the guides informed our group that due to the weather, we'd have a hard out. No matter how far we got at 2:30pm, we'd have to turn around, or else the weather conditions could be too dangerous. Then he asked, "so who wants to be in the fast group, and who wants to be in the slow group?"

I looked at Jaren. This hike was the whole reason he wanted to come to Patagonia. If I raised my hand to take it slow, I knew he'd be compelled to stay with me, and I'd hate myself if we missed the view at the top, poor visibility or not. So I committed to the fast group.

And I hated every step of the way up.

BUT!

That was okay.

In a way, I think it was a sort of kismet. Because, not shockingly, I was the slowest person in the fast group—and this was another lesson I needed to endure.

I hung in there for a while, but there's a steep, 45-minute, uphill climb on a dirt path toward the beginning of the trail. Focused on staying with the group—who were practically flying, by the way, like who are these people??—I felt my lungs gasping for air and my heart beating through my chest. About 3/4 of the way up, I decided it wasn't worth it to blow all of my energy on the first climb, when the final part of the trail is considered the hardest. So I slowed down.

At first, the shame crept in. If there's one thing I hate, it's being considered 'bad' at something. And I was feeling bad at this.

I thought about a saying my dad used to ask me, "Would you rather be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond?" I contemplated that. Had I always gravitated toward being a big fish in a little pond? Because here I was, the littlest, slowest fish in a sea of highly competitive, much faster fish, and I hated it.

Had I always chosen the path of least resistance?

This was another kind of discomfort all together. It was layered: existential and physical.

But this time, I chose to take the advice from the book.

I leaned into the sensations of discomfort, starting with the most tangible: the physical. It was there that I recognized my physical self wasn't in that much pain. My muscles were strong, my legs weren't that tired—it was just the heart beating, the shortness of breath, that slowed me down.

I gave myself credit for that. I focused on my breath. I did my best to stay centered on the moment. And in that moment, I watched my feet step one in front of the other, one in front of the other. And again. And again. And again. I was moving—however slowly—at a steady pace.

And in being present in this way, all sense of 'time' faded. I could recognize that I was moving slower than the group, but I didn't care. Because what was time? What was 'slow' and what was 'fast?' It's all relative. I was moving. And so, the "less-than" feelings faded, too. Because the context of 'competition' just doesn't exist when you're being present. It was just me, my feet, and the mountain.

This was a sensation I'm not sure I've ever had before: by leaning into my discomfort, I was freeing myself from it.

Jaren would occasionally wait for me even though I told him he didn't have to. "I'm going slow," I'd say. "Don't beat yourself up," he responded.

But I wasn't beating myself up. And it wasn't an apology. It was simply a declaration. 'If you're sticking with me, we're going at this pace.' I had surrendered to the discomfort of going slow.

As it turns out, the group had set specific stopping points along the way, so I always had an opportunity to catch up before moving forward. And as was my pattern, I'd stick to the pace for a solid stretch until we hit a long incline. But every time I found myself getting in my head—feeling guilty for being slow, or feeling angry at the group for moving so fast that they weren't even able to acknowledge the views—I returned to the moment.

And in each single, solitary moment, the only thing that existed is what I could see and feel—in my case: my feet, the dirt, and the mountain.

And then: the final leg of the climb—that steep rocky stair-like path that stretches for a little over a half mile.

This was the part I had been dreading. This was the part I'd been prepping for back in LA, climbing stairs in my neighborhood multiple times per week.

What's funny, though, is that the path looked so much more daunting in my mind. With no visual reference, I used other people's descriptions to paint the picture: "dangerous," "windy," and "incredibly steep." In my mind it was dark, rocky, slippery, and treacherous—with sections where you had to climb more than step, and other areas, specifically one called "the windy pass" where the path was flanked by horrifying drops.

It was nothing like that.

In fact, I was already one-fourth of the way through it before I thought to myself, "wait, is this the final stretch?" For one thing, it wasn't dark and daunting—it was light and oddly welcoming. The path was wide—and at some points, yes, it was less of a path and more of a boulder-hop, but there was no fear of plunging to my death, and no need to scale any walls.

That, in and of itself, was a Zen lesson on "worry."

Again with that Buddhist tenet: when we step outside our present moment to 'foresee' something that we've build up in our head, we begin to experience the sensations that haven't yet come to be. And in my case, I wasn't even foreseeing the correct reality, so in worrying I was experiencing sensations that would never come to be. Why put ourselves through it?! The only sensations that need to exist are those we can feel in our present moment. And when you lean into the present moment, those sensations are not so scary—they just are.

After all that, I reached the summit.

And at first, the three towers were hidden by clouds. But as if by some divine intervention, the clouds began to thin—and we could see them. The veil lifted for a moment as if to say, "welcome. You made it through." To top it off, it was snowing. Huge, sticky flakes. It was beautiful and serene.

And I sat on a boulder and I looked at the small lake at our feet, fed by a nameless glacier that towered over the mountain, and I acknowledged its ancient history. And I thought about all the little ant-like people who crawled through its crags to see it, every single day. And how the mountain stands firm, unfazed, unyielding, despite the frenzy of all the tiny people clamoring around it. It really does have the capacity to carry our burdens.

I thought about my cousin's words, which still bring tears to my eyes when I write them now: "The mountain can withstand it."

So I asked the mountain to take my worry, my fear, my anxiety, so far as it could withstand it.

And theway down was a breeze.

It was in part because I knew the way, in part because I am far better at going downhill, but also, I think, in part because I surrendered my worry to the mountain. And the three towers took it.

I didn't care if I slowed down to take photos, or admire the view. I felt like I was floating—thanking every tree that I touched on the way down. The group could wait. And wouldn't you know—they did.

And at the end of it all, we still made great time. My speed on the way up (or down) made no significant impact on when we chose to head home. And no one cared. One guy even slowed down to chat for a while and to reflect on it all. Perhaps being slower created a reprieve for him. And it probably made others feel really good about themselves—it gave them context for their own pace. Great! I had that to offer, then. Because none of it mattered to me anymore.

What was important to me is that I gave myself space to experience the sensations.

After all was said and done, this is the lesson that hit me the hardest on our trip. And it empowers me to be more fearless in my everyday interactions—and in how I map out my goals and strategies for the coming year. I hope it gives me more clarity, too, to trust my sensations as I feel them.

This is the lesson I hope to carry with me in 2019.

When in doubt, I want to lean into the sensations.

I hope the same for you. Because there is freedom in confronting our discomfort. And we all deserve to feel free.

Using Discomfort to Access Freedom: Lessons from Patagonia, Chile