The sauna at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center is pretty large as saunas go, maybe 12 feet by 5 feet, and maybe 7 feet high, with a long bench along one of the 12 foot walls, and a couple of additional benches, at two heights, along the rear 5 foot wall. When possible, I use the highest bench along the rear wall. That's where it's the hottest. But when necessary, I'll use the long bench along the 12 foot wall, and hopefully be able to sit right next to the electric heater.
Here's what happens routinely in the sauna: someone will comment on how "it's not very hot in here today", and then someone else will offer as how it's a good idea to throw some water onto the top of the electric heater so as to create some hot steam. If they happen to have a water bottle with them, they will indeed proceed to do just this, perhaps with a cursory inquiry about whether anyone would mind (with no real intention of letting that stop them, I always feel, unless there were to be a particularly strenuous objection, I suppose).
So this routine has been going on for literally years there at the Center, and what happens periodically is that the heater breaks down - it's not the kind of heater that is designed for water to be thrown into it, or onto it, as some types of electric heaters are, and so the electric elements short out - and then the sauna is closed for a period of some weeks usually, while whatever steps need to be taken are taken to repair/replace the heater elements, and everyone is thereby deprived of the use of the sauna during this period. The management puts up signs prohibiting the use of water on the heater, which go routinely ignored, and has even, finally, covered the thermostat inside the sauna with a wooden plate, since one practice among users is to throw cold water onto the thermostat, thereby cooling it down, which presumably then tells the heater to gear up into a hotter zone. It's all very bizarre, and the cycle repeats itself on into the eternal, or so it seems.
All of this is very much like what people do much of the time within themselves, which leads to one form or another of distress and unhappiness. That is, people behave based on mistaken, inaccurate, and even completely contradictory sets of assumptions, expectations and understandings, expecting a certain set of outcomes which are unrealistic, yet continuing to do the same mistaken things to attempt to bend reality to their mistaken ideas, rather than troubling to learn the ways of reality as it applies in the circumstances, and adapting expectations and behaviors accordingly.
If you don't understand the functioning of a dry sauna, and expect it to behave as if it were a steam room, and if you don't allow enough time for the dry sauna to function as it is meant to do, and if you are expecting it to do its magic on you in the 5 minutes you can spare, for example, then you will inevitably and forever be a disappointed sauna user, and you will wander off into the wilderness of your erroneous ideas never knowing what the actual problem is. All the while the sauna will be working just as it should, and you will continue to believe that it is faulty. You will continue to blame the apple for not being an orange, rather than enjoying the sweet (or sour) taste of the luscious apple in front of you. Sounds simple doesn't it? Yet how difficult it apparently is to adjust one's dearly held beliefs and expectations to accommodate reality.
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