knowing when - and when not - to listen to ourselves

I was teaching this morning and when we got to the 2-minute Savasana after the standing series, a student left to go to the bathroom. Didn't I see the same student leaving just a class or two ago? As she left I said, "are you in the habit of leaving the room during class?" "No!" she assured me, so as she went out the door I said, "good, well, don't get into it!" In the moment I told the class after she left, "if you absolutely have to leave, we're not going to stop you from going outside the room. But remember that even though your mind is telling you that the best thing for you is to get out of the room, that's the same mind that would also like to convince you that shooting heroin is a good idea." If you tried it, I meant - from what I hear about heroin, it's love at first hit - which is why I don't intend to try it. I think they got that. Anyway, the exchange got me thinking about all the self-defeating crap our minds try to get us to do, mine in particular (it being the only one I know from the inside). Not that it's worth beating myself up for this, such behavior is how we're taught to survive in the stressful society around us. Tendencies toward allowing ourselves to be governed by fear of scarcity and violent ends are probably also adaptive to evolving in a world of meager resources and abundant predators - the "nasty, brutish, and short" life of ages past (though sometimes I wonder if life isn't nastier and more brutish if not shorter in the common era than before). Interesting though that fear can be such an illusion ... I've left the room a few times when I thought I was going to die if I didn't, but even after years of practice I can still get to that "get me the heck out of here now" panicky place (one of the great things about Bikram Yoga is that that edge is always accessible if you work for it) and more times than not I've hung tough in the room. Guess what? I'm not dead. I always feel kind of silly after bailing, but hey, practice not perfection. And the next time I'm freaked out by something else that in the moment seems cataclysmic - that I got cut off in traffic, that I'll never amount to anything, that the economy is going to grind to a screeching halt, whatever it is - I'll practice hanging tough, taking a deep breath, and until maybe once someday when I'm wrong, it's not gonna kill me.

Warmly,
Carol