Lot of Learning

I am learning that although I have been teaching Yoga for 8 years, I know so little and there is so much to remember, ie: learn. The information and experience is never ending and so enjoyable. Learning this week about prolonged holding in postures, how to get out of the mind and into the body, be lead by a higher voice (whatever you want to call it), and how to love and not judge others for their version of their experience.
what I learned in March is knowledge by itself is useless, it takes experiencing the lesson and then there may be understanding. This time I am in understanding that we all have a different experience and that is ok, at the root it is all the same lesson, it just shows up differently.
Tonight I had a major understanding from a highly versed and well researched and experienced teacher. Pain, weather physical, mental, or emotional is only greater than or less than according to the perceived. For me that means that mental pain or emotional does not have to be any greater than nor have any more impact than a physical pain unless I choose so. In going into witness, I can perceive the pain on the level I need for my understanding. In other words, an emotional pain can have the potential to effect me no more than the pain in my foot, unless I choose for it to effect me more or less.
In this understanding, I am free to allow an emotional or mental challenge to exist at varying degrees according to my perception of that pain. For me this means that I can no longer view from the witness perspective, a mental or emotional pain as something that needs or can cause me any greater discomfort than holding a posture for a longer time than my physical body is comfortable with. Thus I can evaluate and say to myself, this pain is not greater than any other pain I have experienced, I can allow it to exist without affecting me and breath into it and release when ready.
This is amazing to me, the practice of it will be a challenge, but I am ready for the challenge. I imagine myself experiencing an emotion disappointment and viewing it as no greater than a bump on the head, and I survived that pain when I fell of the bike and lived to tell about it and keep doing my Yoga. Therefore, no perceived pain from someone being rude to me, or saying something hurtful, or suffering a loss will be greater than a physical pain that I can easily let the sensations of pass, unless I want it to be.
Revolution of the mind, I love this Yoga stuff.
Troy