My Schrodinger’s Cat Shavasana Epiphany

Earlier this year, a doctor wanted me to take yoga classes to help with my chronic hypersomnia and daytime tiredness.

I have a membership at the Neenah-Menasha YMCA which offered several types of yoga classes. I decided on one called Power Yoga. After all, power is good. So I have been taught.

I noticed benefits. I’m not certain if the chronic tiredness is any better but, I’m observing improvements in other areas.

Each class ends with savasana or the corpse pose. This is a time for rest and release. It is a difficult pose for me. Well, many poses are, but savasana especially so.

I suffer from monkey mind, and lying quietly seems to rouse that shortcoming quite well. I have tried a few techniques such as observing my breathing, but my mind inevitably slips into a roil.

There is no coherent stream; random thoughts jump to the fore and then disappear. Occasionally a clump of thoughts will arise, or I start thinking about a problem at home. Last week I was touching up some canvas prints before I left for class. During savasana, I wondered if the results would be alright when I checked them later.

While this was going on, in floated Schrodinger’s Cat. The one from the famous thought experiment. The thought cat, placed in a sealed box, had a random chance of living or dying, but no one would know which until the box was opened. Questions arose. Is there a time limit? If I keep a cat in a sealed box for a year, I’ll bet that it is dead. I suspect that the random event is presumed to occur soon after the cat is sealed into its enclosure.

Then the epiphany struck. The fate of the cat is unknown until someone looks inside the box. The touchup success on my prints is unknown until I examine the canvases. All my concern about the unknown result is a waste. I simply had to wait until I returned home. All the thinking in the world would not give me the knowledge of whether my work succeeded.

I doubt that this epiphany will have any effect on the state of Quantum Mechanics. It didn’t have any effect on the outcome of my touchup efforts. Since the cat was pure thought, it didn’t care. This did give me insight on the way my mind can work at cross purposes with itself.

The epiphany did not cure my monkey mind, unfortunately. There are two things I believe will help minimize it, both of them, for me, difficult. They are acceptance and practice. That is; to accept that random thoughts will arise and rattle around. And; to practice letting the thoughts become fleeting because of the acceptance.