I had COVID last week.
It was my second time through, so I knew the drill.
I put on a mask, subbed out all my classes for the next five days, and isolated in the bedroom away from my wife and kids.
On day six, I felt great. I tested and was disappointed to see that the test was ever-so-faintly positive. I texted the studio where I was scheduled to teach the following day and told them the scenario.
Unfortunately no one could sub the class, so we decided that I would test again in the morning: if it came back negative, I’d teach; if not, we’d cancel class. I told them I’d let them know by 6:30.
The next morning I tested first thing. After 15 minutes, the test looked negative. I typed up a text to the studio to tell them I was good to go, but for some reason, I didn’t hit send.
Instead, I held the COVID test up to a different light, then another. I checked it under my phone’s flashlight. I guess I wanted some assurance that everything would be ok.
Within a couple minutes, I thought I saw a faint second line, but I could only see it under certain lights at specific angles. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were playing tricks.
I looked at the clock. It was 6:25. I had to make a call.
On the one hand, I told myself just to cancel the class and be on the safe side, but on the other, I didn’t totally trust my sometimes hyperactive conscience, and I didn’t want to be ruled by irrational fear. I wanted to show up for the students and the studio. I wanted to teach.
In The Yoga Sutras, Patanjali lists nine antaraya, or disturbances, to practice (YS 1:30). One of them is samsaya, or doubt. Of this disturbance, Richard Freeman writes:
“Doubt is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself; it simply means that you see two sides to an argument, or that you see two different ways to do a practice. If you cannot decide between the two sides or two perspectives, you are left in a state of confusion and doubt and you may think that since you do not know what to do, you will do nothing at all.”
Richard Freeman, The Mirror of Yoga, p. 160
I was stuck.
So instead of making a decision, I tested again.
Fifteen minutes later, the second test looked negative, but the positive line on the first test was still sort of there–if I held it up to the right light at just the right angle, that is.
It was 6:40 now, and I was literally sweating.
I realized this paralysis was neurotic–the stakes were probably not even that high–but if anything, seeing that it was neurotic only made me feel more anxious. What I really wanted was a second opinion (or rather, for someone to tell me what to do), but my wife was still sleeping. I wasn’t about to wake her up.
Five minutes later. I went upstairs and and woke up my wife. Ever-patient, she rolled out of bed, rubbed her bleary eyes, and said, “Yes, I see what you see.”
“What should I do?” I asked. “I need to let them know.”
“What do you feel comfortable with?” she asked.
I didn’t know.
I went back downstairs and saw a text from the studio. “Any word yet?”
I texted back that I thought it best to cancel class, and that, finally, was the end of that.
Except it wasn’t exactly, because the whole rigamarole had left a residue.
As Freeman further writes, “Generally we cannot accept doubt within ourselves because doubt means to us a betrayal of blind faith and our ego’s involvement in our practice, rather than a manifestation of our innate intelligence.” (Freeman, p. 161)
That was it! How had I gotten so tripped up by this? I felt like I’d failed.
I took my dog for a walk, and as we meandered through the woods, I remembered something I’d once heard from Ram Dass.
“I was trained as a psychologist. I was in analysis for many years. I taught Freudian theory. I was a therapist. I took drugs for six years intensively. I have a guru. I have meditated since 1970 regularly. I have taught yoga. I have studied Sufism and many kinds of Buddhism. In all that time I have not gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one! The only thing that’s changed is: where previously they were these huge monsters of “No! Don’t take me over again! Aaagh!” That kind of stuff, sitting in the bathtub, cowering. Now they’re like these little shmoos, you know? “Oh, sexual perversity! There you are! I haven’t seen you in days! C’mon in and have some tea!”
Ram Dass, “Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path” (talk), 1988
And this was true in my case, too. While there was something laughable about my antics earlier that morning, I was able to see that even in this case, I’d been much less victimized by my mind than I might have in the years before I had my practice–not only in the intensity and duration of the neurotic paralysis but in the amount of self loathing and recrimination that came up in the aftermath of being unable to immediately manifest my “innate intelligence” and make a decision.
Moreover, I was able to remember that even though I’d been thoroughly caught in my mind, a lot of the time when states of doubt or anger or boredom or craving or dissatisfaction appear, my practice spontaneously arises, giving me the opportunity to drop the thinking component and nonreactively observe the uncomfortable feelings as patterns of sensation in the body until they play out.
In other words, negative thoughts and emotions are frequently now doorways to meditation.
“It’s far out,” Ram Dass says in the same talk. “When you begin to realize suffering is grace, you are so… you can’t believe it. You think you’re cheating!”
The tools I’ve developed through practice have obviously not insulated me (or my wife) from all of my silly antics, but they’ve made enough of a difference that I intend to keep going, and I feel called more than ever to share them with anyone who is interested in giving it a try.
Here is my live teaching schedule (in-person and virtual), a link to my YouTube channel (for prerecorded practices), and if you want to get the blog posts by email, sign up here👇
suburbanyogadad.com 