Training Days 22 & 23: Future Pain

These past couple days of training have been pretty good. Yesterday I jogged 5 miles through the mansion-y part of Beverly Hills where I had the opportunity to enjoy lots of fresh oxygen from the lush gardens around various gated homes. Then I biked to Kate's Flow class at Liberation, then later went to Luminous Tuesdays class at Shakti Box with Trinity. So, lots of physical activity yesterday. Today was just a simple 3 miles up and back on La Jolla. The main issue over these 2 days is a feeling of fear and dread that something might go wrong.

I seem to be sleeping in later and later each day so my jogs usually happen around 9 or 10AM. By this time the day is well underway and the sun is bright. However, since it's winter in LA, it is still cool enough to jog at this time. But as I was running along today I kept thinking "what if it wasn't cool enough? What if it was blazing hot? What if it was so hot I could barely breathe and was exhausted? What if I keep getting up later and later and suddenly I make it so I can't train anymore?" After a couple blocks of this ceaseless inner agitation, I realized that none of it was real. I was projecting myself into an imagined future when I imagined that the conditions would not be ideal for jogging. All of it was in my head. None of it was real. The fact was that today I woke up when I woke up and I jogged when I jogged and it was sunny and cool and perfectly fine.

So this made me ponder Yoga Sutra 2.16 (which came up in a yoga class Monday): "Future suffering can and should be avoided" or in another translation, "Pain that has not yet come is avoidable". Not only is pain that hasn't yet come avoidable - it's not even REAL. It doesn't exist. The real pain is the nagging fearful idea that that pain will one day come and it will be painful. Dude. Why do we humans do this to ourselves? Why do we think that by anticipating problems and living them out in our mind we are somehow safeguarding against them? Why can't we just make the best choices we can make given the information that we have and trust that when those future moments become the present, we will do what we can and we will do our best and only THEN will we deal with pain, if there is pain. But we will not create pain in the meantime based on mind-made ideas about potential pain. You know?