The Horizon Effect

In my last blog post, Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, I talked about the hazards of always living in your comfort zone. Your capacity to tolerate adversity only grows through experience. If you live in your comfort zone all the time, you are using your energy to manage life so you will never be uncomfortable. My teacher Kamini Desai says, ” the circle of comfort you create, soon turns into a prison of comfort”. We avoid things we perceive as bad and seek things we perceive as good. Personally, my biggest offense arises when it’s time for me to go to the dentist. As soon as I get the checkup call, I feel the threat of pain I will experience in the future. I am no longer living in the present but I am living in fear of the future and the conflict of avoidance. I utilize all my energetic resources to maintain comfort. I reschedule the appointment several times. The morning of the appointment and the evening before are consumed by thoughts of how I can postpone this appointment and avoid it even further. It is exhausting.

Perhaps for you, the pursuit is not money, it is body image. Do you think, “after I lose these pounds or after I gain this muscle, I will look just right”? The truth is, even if you do attain that goal, the mind will rest for a moment but then it will go on to find the next perceived problem. In yoga, we call this the horizon affect. The perceived problem will never be solved without a new problem arising. It is the nature of having a human mind. We all experience the horizon affect.

Problems in relationships, with money and in career usually arise as unresolved experiences from childhood. I talked about this in What’s Your Karma? But we rarely recognize this for what it is. As the saying goes, we can’t see the forest through the trees. We are just too close to it. We work and fight and struggle to fix things we want to change but the problem isn’t the problem. The problem is the perception of the problem. The problem is the perceived lack.