Learning from the tail-severing ability of lizards!

When attacked by a predator, many lizards practice autotomy, a feature allowing the tail to sever, thus enabling the lizard to flee unharmed. Often the detached tail will continue to wriggle, creating a deceptive sense of continued struggle and distracting the predator's attention from the fleeing lizard. A set of sphincter muscles then contracts around the caudal artery to minimize bleeding. Over a period of weeks, the tail will at least partially regenerate!

I find this ability amazingly instructive for us as human beings. When we are attacked emotionally by another person, our wounded sense of identity will wriggle in pain at the offense. But perhaps we can make a virtue from the suffering by creating a kind of game out of it, allowing our surface identity to "play" hurt while secretly detaching ourselves from the need to react to the incident and withdrawing instead into our Center.

Several weeks ago, I came across an amazing quote by Carlos Castaneda. He says: "No person is important enough to make me angry." Perhaps the same could be said of emotional hurt! In any case, I am so grateful for the vastness and beauty of Nature which enables me to release my sense of identity from the claustrophobia and tightness of painful human interactions, and melt instead into a Larger Whole!

Photo: Lizard regrowing a tail, near Moab, UT, April 19, 2015