Impulse Control

I've been thinking lately about that little space between "I want" and the action to achieve that want. Generally, it's helpful to expand that space enough to think a little. The action becomes more conscious, the decision to act is more thoughtful. But sometimes when the space between the two becomes too large, we lose the opportunity for action. Losing the opportunity can work to our advantage if it was, say, an opportunity to eat a large piece of pie and we're trying to control our sugar intake. But there are other times, and other opportunities, we don't want to lose.

I haven't written here for a while, not because I don't want to or because I've had nothing to say, but because I have another writing project, a book, to work on. When I feel an impulse to write, I try to direct it in that way, rather than bringing it here. Sometimes that works just fine. Other times I find that while I may resist the urge to write here, the urge never actually gets successfully redirected, and instead I just sit and twitch, or read, or browse the internet.

There have been some other drops into my consciousness causing me to think about this idea of impulse control and how it works, or doesn't sometimes. For one thing, we're still in January, the time of resolution. Much of my teaching these days takes place in a gym so I have now fully experienced the swell of people filled with resolve showing up to work and sweat, determined to do whatever it is they've decided must be done this year. Willpower, something I don't really believe in, is thrown around a lot this time of year.

In a rather different direction, there is Haiti and the tragedy there. Whenever something large and catastrophic like that happens, I begin to think about a different kind of impulse, an impulse to help, to pitch in.

The interesting thing is that sometimes I find I get so caught up in controlling my own impulses, and in my head I'm talking about the "bad" ones, and I get so successful at it, that I don't differentiate and begin to control the "good" impulses as well. When I work to control my impulses, that is not the result I'm looking for. But somehow my mind builds the habit of restraint, avoidance, and simply applies it to all situations. I think that's really the trouble with habits in general, they become tapes we just run without thought.

That in turn brought me around to giving a little more thought to two of the eight limbs of yogic philosophy, the yamas and the niyamas. I've talked about a few of them individually in this blog, but to be honest I never really looked that closely at the concepts behind them as grouped in this way, two separate things. In my mind I tend to put them all together. And really, look at what they're called! Don't they just cry out to be grouped together? They sound like the name of a band. But the yamas are specifically restraints, things we strive not to do, while the niyamas are practices in right-thinking, things we strive to do. When we build in a restraint, we need to teach ourselves to do something else, to practice building good qualities.

When I have an impulse towards one of these right actions, or perhaps I should call them skillful actions, it can still be useful to pause for thought before moving, but not in the sense of resisting the flow of what wants to happen through me. Which takes me back to my writing example. There may be times when it is more important just that the writing happen somewhere, because sometimes when I try to control it, I restrain it altogether. A new thing for me to learn and practice.

And now that I've practiced doing here, rather than not doing, I am off to do elsewhere. Skillful action, not inaction.

copyright 2010 J. Autumn Needles