Edited By Diane Majeske • Photography by Susan Ayer

Crazy Wisdom Journal asked a number of leaders in southeastern Michigan’s conscious living community to reflect upon times in their lives that they’ve left their comfort zones to venture out in new ways. In the distant past or much more recently, we asked, what did you do, what inspired you, did it change you, inside or outside, big or little? Did you attend a new class, take an adventurous trip, go skydiving, stretch beyond a long entrenched boundary, start a new relationship or end an old one, take a leap, retire, join the Peace Corps, go on a night trek in the wilderness, or just do something way out of your ordinary?

Angie Martell: The Greatest Transformations Happen When You Leave Your Comfort Zone

Angie Martell is an experienced attorney, mediator, and peacekeeper with over 30 years of legal experience. Martell is the founder and managing partner of Iglesia Martell Law Firm and Colibri Institute of Social Justice.

My greatest transformations in my life have always begun when I have stepped outside of my comfort zone—when I have pushed beyond the place of mental limitations and/or resistance and fear.

Leaving my comfort zone has always felt like jumping into a big black abyss where everything is unknown… where my mind races with negative thoughts about what may lurk beneath the surface. Rather than see these moments as infinite possibilities, unfortunately, I tend to immediately jump into a place of fear.

For most of us, this past year has brought great uncertainty. 2020 raised great fears, not only about our very survival, but how we would weather the storm of stressful political times in a pandemic where uncertaintyas well as great loss of human life surrounded us. At the same time, living with two seventeen-year-olds in quarantine as they navigated their lives remotely, also gave me perspective on what truly mattered in life and what living a life of purpose meant—understanding what life should feel like, tapping into my inner calling, trusting myself and forgetting what others think, feeling the fear but taking the first step anyway, doing a daily check in, and recognizing that I have everything I need and giving gratitude for that.

It has been a year not only of great introspection but also of my greatest personal and career transformation. I sat at home in the early stages of the pandemic and pondered what was important in my life, what I wanted to do in the next five years, and how I was going to continue to build community as a lawyer, shamanic practitioner, curandera, reiki practitioner, and social justice activist. How was I going to adapt to the changes necessary to fulfill those dreams?

Ten years ago, I left New York (the city I had lived in all my life) and moved to Michigan. The beginning of my Michigan journey was hard: I didn’t have a job, my same sex marriage was not recognized, I had young children. I felt very different from everyone else because I was a Puerto Rican Lesbian East Coast person who talked too loud and didn’t understand tone. I didn’t drive. I broke my ankle. (Actually I was so terrified of driving that retrospectively, I think that I may actually have broken my ankle to put off driving!) If all that wasn’t enough, I also had no idea whether the laws of the state of Michigan would allow me to waive the State Bar. Finally, I was even horrible at geography, so finding addresses before the ubiquity of GPS was like a puzzle that greeted me every morning: I had left behind the comfort of an environment I could navigate very well.

I am not saying that I am not scared when I venture out of my comfort zone. Leaving my comfort zone is not easy and at times it has been downright terrifying. Over the years, as someone used to riding NYC’s subways and being comfortable driving only at 20-35 mph, screaming down the Michigan highways at 70 mph filled me with absolute terror. I conquered that fear by meditating before getting in the car, playing music, and seeing each drive as a journey of limited duration. Due to that first step, I am now comfortable driving throughout the state for hours to represent my clients.

Starting my law firm and my social justice organization was also terrifying and definitely had me leaving the comfort of a reliable paycheck. I also had a steep learning curve, especially on the technological front. I am now a zoom master, and I am glad I didn’t turn into a cat for any of my presentations.

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It’s not often easy to set aside your fears.…fears of limitation, failure, judgment. However, I have found that initial resistance becomes the greatest impediment. There have been days lately that I take one fear at a time. I love the ocean, but for a long time I feared it. My fear deprived me of the ability to explore a relationship with the ocean. Recently, after carrying this decade old fear, I took a leap of faith and enrolled in a snorkeling class and channeled my golden retriever Zoey to keep my fear at bay. I saw the most amazing sea turtle and a large rock that turned out to be a manta ray, and so the magic began….

My time here in Michigan taught me that leaving my comfort zone is the place of my greatest growth. It has taught me to see myself in a different way, to have the courage to speak up, to live in my truth, to be a good strategist and problem solver, to believe in myself, to be in flow, and to be the master gardener, not only of my actual garden, but my spiritual garden. Michigan taught me not only how resilient I am but who I am and that si se puede, yes, I can…yes, I can do anything. By expanding my comfort zone, I have acquired new skills, expanded my goals, and expanded and changed my concentration and focus.

If we could all move outside of our comfort zones, we could all find so many creative solutions to empower ourselves and others, be part of a planet that is so amazing, and care about each other a little more than just living in spaces where we don’t grow. Leaving our comfort zone is about change. Coming together as a people is about change. And the more we leave our comfort zones and come together, the better we can be.

I look forward to the future despite the challenges that may arise because I have learned to rise to challenges and, rather than see them as obstacles, to see them as possibilities of expansion that allow me to not only weather the storm, but embrace it.

Lama Nancy Burks: Stepping from Comfort into Spiritual Therapy

*Lama Nancy Burks is a retired psychologist who teaches and leads meditation practices at the Karma Thegsum Choling Buddhist Center in Ann Arbor.*

The older I’ve become, the more I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone. Sometime in my late 20s, I adopted the slogan, “No guts, no glory,” and I can’t say that I’ve always followed it, but when I have, it’s usually led somewhere fruitful.

Definitely the farthest I’ve gone is the three-year retreat I completed in my late 40s, from late 1996 to the beginning of 2000. It was a traditional Tibetan Buddhist retreat and it’s actually more than three years—it’s three years, three months, and three days in a cloistered, highly-structured setting, and I lived during that time as a nun. I’m not a nun now, but all participants took temporary vows during that time period. We had no contact with the male retreatants who lived in another building.

Prior to going on retreat, I was a clinical psychologist living in Kingston, NY, doing private practice and consulting at local hospitals. I was married, and in 1994 my husband, Yeshey, was suddenly diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died three months later. That was the inciting incident that pushed me to do the three-year retreat. At that time, I’d been a practicing Buddhist for almost 20 years. If Yeshey hadn’t died, I have no doubt I would have continued with my fairly comfortable life and wouldn’t have joined the retreat. When he got sick, our teacher, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, suggested the three-year retreat as a possibility that would not only benefit me, but also Yeshey, should he pass away. At that time, it was obvious he wasn’t going to live very long. This terrible life-changing event brought everything in my life into question.

The headquarters of our organization is in Woodstock, NY, and the retreat center, Karme Ling, is in the country west of there, outside a very small town in a very rural area of New York. One thing that made this retreat so far out of my comfort zone was the very strict schedule. We started every day at 4 a.m. and we finished at 9 p.m. We had three breaks for meals followed by work periods, and we were very busy trying to complete all the different practices we were assigned, as well as other tasks like making ritual offerings, practicing the musical instruments used during chanting, and studying the texts, which were all in Tibetan. Unlike nuns in Tibet, all this was new to us and needed to be learned quickly. Khenpo Rinpoche, our retreat master, taught us everything we needed to know and was available to answer all our questions.

Each day we had four periods of 2 ½ hours each of individual practice in our rooms. These were advanced practices which involved chanting, prayers, a lot of mantras, and a lot of complicated visualizations. We also had several other group practices that we did together in the shrine room. All together, we practiced 13-14 hours a day. And we also had chores like house cleaning, bringing in firewood, and meal clean-up.

I am not a morning person, so getting up before 4 a.m. was way out of my comfort zone. I also don’t do well when I don’t get enough sleep. That aspect of the retreat was very hard for me—getting up so early, and not getting enough sleep. My comfort zone involved having a lot of control over my own schedule and activities, and it was a real shock to give this up. There were also many issues with the group dynamic among the 12 of us women (11 retreatants and a cook/attendant) living together, and all of us struggling with the loss of our comfort zones in one way or another.

We had carpeting, and we had electricity, and a woodstove downstairs to heat the whole building, so the external setting was much more comfortable than is traditional in Tibet, but the inner discomfort was at least as grueling. It was definitely full-time, 24/7, 365 days a year. Occasionally, we got a half-day off to clean our shrine and set it up for the next practice, but this only happened a few times a year.

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And that’s a big part of what the retreat was designed to do—to push us out of our comfort zone. There were no escapes. There were no telephone calls, no entertainment. We could read books, but they had to be about spirituality or Buddhism, and we didn’t have access to a computer. We could only leave Karme Ling in case of an emergency. Not having any escape made it clear how many of my reactions to stress were based on my own habits and projections and not on an external reality. You gain a deeper understanding of how your mind works, and there’s nowhere to hide from the less pleasant parts of yourself.

Looking back, my retreat was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and definitely the most meaningful. It was deeply transformative; I guess you could say it was a kind of spiritual therapy—a cross between boot camp and psychoanalysis. One of the hardest things for me was just following orders. The discipline. You don’t ask, you just do. If you had questions, you could talk to Rinpoche individually—he was wonderful, very encouraging and supportive. Whenever I told him how inadequate I felt, he helped me keep going. I probably would have left if not for his reassurance.

I had a great sense of accomplishment—and relief—from completing those three years. Afterward, I moved back to my hometown, Ann Arbor, which I had left when I was 17. My parents were now in their 80s and I wanted to be near them.

I’m still assimilating all my retreat experiences. I felt very reclusive at first, having been away from society, and from work, for so long. When I completed the retreat, I was given the title of Lama, and my teacher encouraged me to teach at the KTC center here in Ann Arbor, but I didn’t feel ready for that for a long time. I did start attending regularly, though, and the first time I walked in the door after my retreat I met a man who I connected with, and we were eventually married. We’ve been together ever since. That helped a lot.

Eventually, I began working again, though it was hard at first—definitely out of my new comfort zone! I ended up working for another 15 years until I retired. Since then, I’ve become more involved in teaching at the meditation center. I particularly enjoy giving individual spiritual guidance as well as helping to run the center.

From my view as a Buddhist, humans are creatures of habit. We’re ingrained not only in our daily habits, but in how we see the world. Pushing our comfort zones, going outside their boundaries, helps us to see things differently. It helps us understand that what we’re experiencing in our life at any given point isn’t a fixed thing. It seems very solid, but it’s not. It’s just how we perceive things at that particular moment. Stepping out of our comfort zone gives us a much bigger perspective. I think it helps free us. Often, we have a fixed sense of what the world is and our place in it, what expectations are put on us by ourselves and others. Going outside that comfort zone showed me that I had other options.