Rather Than Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone, Get into Your Learning Zone
I’m sure you’ve heard it, time and time again, the oft-used axiom, “Growth happens outside your comfort zone.” Of course, there is some truth in this statement. Change and growth generally occur when we bump up against new people, ideas, and experiences. If we avoid or dismiss these things, residing only in what we know, unchallenged, with nothing new coming our way, we are likely to remain as we are. It’s also true that this growth is rarely – if ever – comfortable.
Yet, if we get too far out of our comfort zone we aren’t going to grow either. Instead, we end up in an Autonomic Nervous System response that puts us into some version of fight, flight, or freeze, effectively shutting down the higher functioning of our brain, leading to stagnation or even, regression.
You might now find yourself asking, where then, do I need to be for growth to happen?
The Learning Zone.
As Chris discussed in the previous post (It’s Hard to Know What to Say) the Learning Zone is the space where just-enough unknown combines with just-enough safety, making us present and available to a wider range of feelings and experiences.
The Learning Zone is far from comfortable. It’s often radically uncomfortable, but the discomfort is productive. You can breathe into it, your full faculties are online, and you can reflect on the experience you are having as you are having it. It’s similar to that feeling when you are lifting weights: it’s challenging and uncomfortable, your muscles might be shaking, and you can take a deep breath and do one more rep. And then maybe even, one more.
In our 4-Month Verdant Collective Immersion, we come back to the Learning Zone in almost everything we do. It is absolutely essential to our explorations of erotic embodiment in community, allowing us to explore our yes and our no, our capacity to know and name what we want, and to access states of deep arousal and pleasure. This will also be integrated into our upcoming online program, Erotic Embodiment and the Triune Autonomic Nervous System.
This active use of the Learning Zone is one of the things that set us apart from other programs that work with erotic embodiment. We are not about peak experiences. We won’t have you chasing down another orgasm (although orgasms are more than welcome) or blasting past your edges and boundaries.
Instead, we invite you to pause, to notice what’s happening right now, and to perhaps move a little to the left. To get curious about what’s happening in all the layers of your being so that you can make choices that include all the parts of you. And to move from and toward ever more integration and wholeness.
The world needs you right now – in your full presence, feeling, and ferocity. And we are dedicated to helping you nourish your wholeness in wild and unconventional ways.
