When it comes to life, suffering and challenge is inevitable. This can be a difficult truth to come to terms with and we often spend a lot of our waking time diligently denying it and escaping it.
What if there was a way to not only make this process easier, but actually learn to prepare yourself for it as well as grow and deepen your life through it?
Introducing the the art of conscious challenging.
The idea is as follows:
Challenging yourself consciously and intentionally, simulating life’s difficulties, in order to train your emotions and your mind to develop the capacity to engage and accept life’s challenges that are outside of your control.
You create a training ground of sorts in which to develop your character into one that accepts challenge/discomfort/suffering, absorbs it and uses it to grow oneself. Since you are the one inducing the suffering, you have a little bit more control over it and can reduce the load if you get too overwhelmed, unlike in real life.
Implementing something like this effectively, will change your life in profound ways.
In what ways can you challenge yourself consciously?
If you are wondering how you can challenge yourself in this conscious way, here are some potential ideas for you:
Abstain from something that finds itself regularly in your life. This could be sugar, alcohol, snacks, television, social media or more subtle things such as takeaway coffees, warm showers or using sauce on your food. See my subtle abstain challenge blog where I discuss more on this.
Fast one day each week. Either do the full day or just until dinner time.
Taking a cold shower once per week.
Training for something physical such as a 5K running race or just taking up a new challenging physical skill such as gym, yoga or rock climbing.
Have a month where you are only allowed to spend money on bare necessities.
Sleep on the floor once per week.
Approach a stranger and start a conversation.
Take a new course that might advance your career.
Learn a new skill.
Do chores before relaxing – engage with the most emotionally difficult tasks first.
If you drink coffee, have your first cup each day only from 11am.
Spend a week not seeing any friends or family and spend every evening in solitude asking questions about yourself and your life.
Spend a day without any electronic devices.
Spend a day doing nothing, just sitting on your couch.
Develop a meditation practice.
Journal about things you struggle with and your traumas.
Have a tough but necessary conversation with a loved one that you may have been avoiding.
Do a 10 day silent retreat.
The goal with these, is to find something that challenges your current mental structure, your attachments, your identity, your routine, your comfort and your ego. You are intentionally provoking your emotional system, in order to learn to let go deeper, face tough emotions deeper, accept turmoil deeper and transcend any present suffering better and better.
The point of this, is so that when life throws you a curveball and you get thrown into an unexpected situation with suffering, you have trained yourself like a warrior.
He who sweats more in training bleeds less in battle.
What happens when you don’t challenge yourself consciously?
When you don’t consciously challenge yourself, you become complacent. Your character remains where it has always been and you become more vulnerable to the movements of life’s difficulties. You get thrown around from emotional situation to emotional system like a victim, without the knowledge of how to handle yourself.
This can be dangerous as it might cause you to develop a deep fear towards life and double down on escaping into all sorts of addictions that society presents you with.
Do not get too lost in comfort. It feels like the right thing to do, but like pleasure, it can be a big trap, and can end up becoming your biggest downfall when it comes to living and extraordinary life.
If you don’t challenge yourself consciously, life will challenge you unconsciously — and you won’t be ready. When comfort becomes your baseline, life’s difficulties hit harder. You react more, fear more, retreat more. Over time, you may find yourself avoiding life itself — hiding behind addictions, distractions, and surface-level pleasures.
It is very counter-intuitive to say, but the life that you dream of and the highest vision you have of yourself, lies behind the door of embracing and consciously creating challenges in your life.
This requires mature long-term thinking.
Key points to keep in mind when engaging in the conscious challenging process
Start Small
Don’t do too many challenges at once. Similar to installing and removing habits, easing yourself in is the best strategy. If you take on too much challenge at once it can overwhelm you, reducing your ability to stay conscious during the process. This can lead to an ego backlash where you suddenly switch to escape mode and end up escaping into television, food, sex etc.
Meet Yourself Where You Are
Spend some time contemplating exactly where you think you need improvement in terms of your ability to face challenges. Find out your weak spots, your worst attachments and your most prevalent emotional issues and figure out what challenges will allow you to be effective yet challenged enough to get the growth you are looking for. It’s about finding the balance between challenges that are too easy for your level of development and those that are way above where you are. For example, if you have never meditated before, there is no point in picking a 10 day silent retreat as a conscious challenge. Slow and steady is always more powerful.
Remind Yourself Of The Vision
Remind yourself that for these challenges, although they can create the same fearful discomfort of a genuine life difficulty, you are just training yourself, and the present pain is a mechanism to induce the growth that you are looking for. You are purposefully embracing different forms of challenge and suffering so that, over time, you suffer less and less because of your ability to accept and absorb and make use of it. So the key idea here is just to keep focusing on the purpose and the vision of this practice of conscious challenging to remind you of the context of why you are choosing to suffer purposefully.
Stay Conscious
The point of this exercise is not just to induce suffering and have a terrible time. It is to intentionally induce some form of challenge, which will provoke your system, for you to then consciously feel into, observe, absorb, let go of and detach from as much as you can. You are training yourself, much like a martial artist trains himself in the gym.
Conscious challenging is a powerful tool for transformation. By intentionally facing discomfort, you build resilience, clarity, and emotional strength. The more you practice, the more prepared you become for life’s inevitable challenges. Remember: it’s not about suffering for its own sake — it’s about using adversity as a doorway to your highest self. Be intentional. Be conscious. Be courageous.
#31
