Simply put, I’m a cold weather person. I’m that guy who will sneakily set the thermostat on the air conditioning low enough to make everyone in the building don sweaters. There’s a reason why such a high percentage of pictures of me on the internet also feature snow-covered slopes.

Which is why on May 19th, 2019, you wouldn’t have expected to find me in Hanoi, Vietnam, willingly slipping on a thickly padded helmet and throwing my leg over a motorbike with the “feels like” reading at 122F (50C). About to begin a two wheeled three week journey across a country full of air thick enough to swim through, and no white-capped mountains for a thousand miles.

Then add in the inescapable traffic resembling a confused wasp colony, fifteen-ton buses blindly using the opposite lane to pass, unpredictable downpours creating tidal waves of muddy road water, and a shockingly high mosquito to human ratio. Doesn’t really sound like my scene. Or anyone’s for that matter.

But I didn’t leave a good life behind to go out into the world and spend most of my days sipping daiquiris in resort towns. Near the top of the Document of Intents I wrote before the trip, there is the following bullet point: “Greatly expand my comfort zone”.

Many people reflexively recoil when they imagine venturing outside of what makes them feel at ease. Folks like me who enjoy challenging themselves physically and mentally in seemingly pointless ways can get a bad rep as being masochistic. But the truth of why I do it so often is simple: because I love being comfortable. What better way to ensure long lasting comfort than to intentionally condition yourself to be comfortable in as many different situations as possible? To put it another way: I love learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

If you’re already convinced and want to start following my strategy, before you go gallivanting about, wildly hurling yourself into uncomfortable situations, you should be aware of an important sub-point which I’ve never been good at adhering to. Adequate rest is essential between comfort zone expanding situations.

What you’re doing with this tactic is injecting controlled amounts of stress into your life. Small stressors with the right amount of rest mixed in can lead to stable growth. They call it hormesis in biology, and it’s the reason behind how things like building muscle work. When performing a vigorous workout, you actually damage the muscle fibers. But if you then allow time for recovery, they grow back stronger. I only wish college-aged, iron-pumping Kolin had understood this concept better before wreaking permanent havoc on his musculoskeletal system with a disdain of rest days.

Since my rewarding but exhausting tour of Vietnam, I’ve still been pursuing intense, high growth ventures during my travels. But I’ve also made a point to sprinkle in restful experiences more conventionally considered to be comfortable, such as sun soaked afternoons lazing around the peaceful parks of Amsterdam, fresh cooked pasta slowly savored in Tuscan hilltop towns, and pastel sunsets enjoyed from hammocks on secluded Asian beaches.

However, I recently faced a week-long string of difficult situations while at a silent meditation retreat in the Thai jungle where adequate rest wasn’t an option, and pasta certainly wasn’t on the menu…

Perched on side of a small mountain, steep pathways cut through thick tropical foliage full of large spiders, venomous snakes, scorpions, and a never-ending variety of flying insects whose sole purpose for existence seemed to be attacking human beings. Wake up bells aggressively tolled at 4:30am to start each day, and the demanding schedule of back-to-back meditations left little room for recovery time. On top of all that, you couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Luckily, you could still use body language if necessary, which came in handy when I was so deeply in the zone during a walking meditation, that someone needed to physically point out the two meter long snake slithering silently on the railing next to me.

During this particular retreat, I found myself struggling at a level unfamiliar to me. Way out of my comfort zone, I tried to utilize the several hours of meditation I was practicing each day to look deeper for a way to get through the experience while maintaining my sanity. By the end of the retreat, not only was my mind still sane, it was thriving with a remarkable level of clarity.

Before we get into how that happened, I need to rewind a little to explain a related travel-induced insight that arose during the last few months. It ultimately is what helped me overcome the significant challenges I was faced with at the retreat, and gave me an entirely new perspective on comfort zones.

The cliché reasoning behind most travelers setting off away from their homes usually involves some hope of “finding themselves”. But in my case, I’ve found solo travelling to be a very useful way to lose yourself.

Useful you say? That sounds rather frightening. Why would I want to lose myself when I’ve been putting in work every day since I was born to create myself; countless hours crafting the unique individual which I am proud to call me?

Unfortunately, that guy with the big belly who has over 500 million followers worldwide would call that a bunch of wasted effort. In fact, he would go further and call it harmful effort in the wrong direction.

Which brings us to the Buddhist concept of no-self. There are a number of ways to interpret what the Buddha meant in his teaching of every entity lacking a definitive self. The concept sometimes causes stress for over-analytical philosophical people – myself included – trying to wrap their head around it. But my current interpretation is essentially this: human beings are impermanent, ever-changing processes, and therefore have no fixed characteristics that can be considered a “self”. Forgetting this can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. 

There’s an easy thought experiment which should push you in the direction towards understanding what I mean. I’ll briefly play it between a wise anonymous voice and myself:

Q: Who are you?
A: I’m Kolin.

Q: So if your legal name changed to something else, who would you be then? 
A: I’d be the same person. I actually used to be Colin, but when the court papers came back for my name change I still felt like the same person. Names are just labels.

Q: Okay, so how would you define yourself to someone who doesn’t know you?
A: Let me pull up my Couchsurfing profile…here we go: “I’m an easy-going, outdoor loving, meditation teacher/adrenaline junkie from the sunny state of California.”

Q: Alright, now let’s say you went a little too hard with the adrenaline and fractured your spine to the point where you couldn’t pursue sports anymore. Or let’s say you suffered a severe stroke and could no longer teach meditation anymore. Who would you be then?
A: Hmm, I guess I’d have to find new things to do…And I suppose I’m not defined by my physical body either, because that’s changing all the time too.

Q: Good, you’re catching on, but surely there must be something that is you?
A: What about my mind! All of my experiences and the permanent memories they created make up who I am.

Q: Let’s say you hit your head instead of your spine, and half of your memory is gone?
A: Good point…

If philosophy is not your thing, just look at modern particle physics. We’re made up of a bunch of molecules which are not unique, and are constantly changing. There’s no point in time throughout your life where your atomic structure is exactly the same.

So why is any of this important? To some people the idea that there can’t exist a self which isn’t continuously in flux is obvious and not particularly useful. However, the deeper I’ve gone into my meditation practice, the more I’ve realized how useful of a tool this understanding can be. When you look carefully, you begin to realize a significant number of our problems are created from believing there exists a static entity called “me”, an ego which can be boosted or bruised.

How about that time you were at the dance bar seeking companionship, and you spotted an attractive man or woman sitting alone, but did absolutely nothing about it? That person is way out of my league, and I don’t like the song playing right now so I wouldn’t even be able to dance to it. When our sense of self is strong, we tell ourselves unhelpful and untrue stories about how we can and should act. So then, you might retort with something like: “fine, but what if I only think positively about myself and my abilities, so I have the confidence to do anything?”

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t work. Let’s pretend you’re a regular looking fellow who puts in the effort to stay fit, but you overhear a comment at the water cooler about how it looks like you put on a little weight since you returned from the tropics. You’re probably going to instantly react in a hurt and defensive manner. But where is that negative feeling coming from? From the fixed notion in your mind that you are a person who is fit. Surely all the work you do to sculpt your body when you’re not occasionally indulging in roast lamb and pineapple laced cocktails gives you the right to think this way. But the reality is there’d be nothing to defend if your mind didn’t contain an ingrained, static notion of not being overweight.

At this point, there’s no need to flip the table upside down from frustration at what you thought were the hard won characteristics that make up your self. The modern world requires us to play the ego game from time to time. I can’t imagine you’d get very far in a job interview with a blank resume claiming you cannot represent yourself on paper because you’re an ever-changing, impermanent entity with no uniquely defining characteristics (unless you were interviewing for a position as a Buddhist philosopher, in which case you might get the job).

But for the vast majority of cases where the illusory self does more harm than good, there’s a step you can take in the right direction to mitigate the suffering. You can train yourself to be aware of moments where you’re reacting in an undesirable way due to a false conception of self. Over time, you’ll become skilled in recognizing these situations and remembering the underlying truth that there’s no need to suffer because of them. You can play fact checker on the stories constantly spewing from the overdeveloped part of your mind you call “me”. Mindfulness to the rescue!

You can practice this on a daily basis no matter where you are, but I’ve found traveling alone to be a powerful shortcut towards breaking down your ego, or “losing yourself”. One of the biggest reinforcers of the unchanging self comes from our repetitive routines which constantly remind us of who we think we are.

When I was in San Francisco, the first sight I woke up to every morning was my wall full of outdoor gear. This was partly intentional, because I liked being reminded that I was a person who had accomplished things in the great outdoors. Later in the morning when I arrived at my office, I switched from outdoor athlete to Technical Product Manager. I’d constantly be surrounded by people who had seen me operate for years, many of whom respected my ability to make important decisions for the team.

But since I’ve been traveling, I often wake up by myself in a completely new environment every few days. There are practically no physical reminders of a past life, and I’m usually interacting with completely new people who have no idea I’ve climbed glaciers or made respectable decisions influencing the design of a technical product. So to some extent, I become a blank slate. Devoid of past meaning, but full of potential for enjoying the people and places presently in front of me without being weighed down by past perceptions of myself. I get to experience my surroundings through a lens less clouded by who I think I am.

Let’s bring it full circle and fast forward to just a few days ago. I’m laying in the sticky air of the jungle retreat center dormitory packed to the brim with flat wooden boards and curved wooden blocks that Buddhist monks refer to as beds and pillows. Despite knowing I need to wake up two hours before dawn to return to my mental training, I can’t sleep due to the fire ants and bed bugs taking turns stinging me and gnawing at my flesh. They must have laughed as they easily slipped underneath the mosquito net intended to protect me. Then, just when it seems like the situation is as bad as it can get, thunder begins to crackle directly overhead, and sideways droplets start streaming through the barred window beside me. The mosquito net fails in its protection duties once again, and I begin to get wet.

Sounds pretty terrible, right? Miraculously, none of it was bothering me. Being the last night of the retreat, I had been practicing letting go of myself and my unhelpful reactions for days. It was grueling work, but my efforts were beginning to pay off. I was able to temporarily put myself into a state where my higher awareness took over, and recognized I could be comfortable in that moment by setting aside my imaginary self’s desire to sleep and not be located on a damp, insect-infested piece of wood. As soon as your ego temporarily vanishes, the unnecessary storyteller is quieted, and your comfort zone becomes limitless.

Now I share this anecdote with you not because I want you to think the goal of meditation is to achieve states where you can constantly detach from everything and become some sort of care-less superhuman. It’s merely an example of a powerful effect of awareness training when practiced at an intense level, where you can take the idea of no-self to the extreme.

Unfortunately, you’re probably not going to have wildly insightful experiences by completing the 10 day Headspace trial. But I can promise that if you practice well for enough time, the awareness of mind you’ll cultivate will accelerate your ability to skillfully turn situations which used to cause suffering into opportunities to be more comfortable by re-inventing yourself in any moment. My ego used to tell stories of being a cold weather person, and now it’s learning to live in the heat.