44 YOGA JOURNAL
WISDOMBut the Tantric authors of the Vijnana Bhairava and the Spanda
Karikas—two advanced yogic texts—offer a much more nuanced
take on pleasure. If classical yoga and Vedanta see the world as
fundamentally illusory, and its pleasures as distractions to be
transcended, the Tantrists look on the body and the world as shakti:
divine conscious energy. One of the most beautiful of all the Tantric
ideas is that the body, the senses, and the brain are instruments
through which spirit—or consciousness—takes pleasure in itself.
When you see life this way, enjoyment (when experienced with
awareness) becomes a way of honoring the divine. A famous Tantric
verse reads, “Some people think that where there is yoga there can
be no enjoyment, and when there is worldly pleasure, there can be
no yoga. But on this path, both yoga and worldly enjoyment come
and sit in the palm of your hand.”
Of course, bringing together yoga and “worldly enjoyment”
requires discipline. One of my teachers once counseled an
overweight, chocolate-addicted student to offer herself tiny pieces
of chocolate as though she were offering sweets to a deity inside—
and to chew them very slowly. I don’t know whether it ultimately
worked for her, but I’ve used this practice for years as a way of
enjoying sweets without overindulging. Discipline and a sense of the
sacred are key here. But so is pleasure.Driven by Pleasure
Pleasure is the emotional core of our sense of aliveness.
Moreover, it is the primary motivator in our lives. As a spiritual
practitioner of nearly 50 years, I’ve seen this in myself and in
my students over and over again. It’s impossible to stay with
any practice unless you enjoy it. Anything you engage in simply
because it’s good for you—a diet, a relationship, work, or
meditation—will eventually fall away unless you take pleasure
in it.
From a mystical point of view, our capacity for enjoyment is
the signature of the inherent blissfulness of creation. According
to brain science, we are wired for pleasure. Pleasure centers
are located in the midbrain, the seat of emotions, and they are
designed to fire in response to stimuli that ensure physical
survival. Food, sex, and aerobic exercise all trigger the pleasure
centers, sending chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin
to the cortical area where the brain recognizes that something
you’re doing is good and should be continued.
In healthy cycles, the higher brain chooses pleasures that
are conducive to the survival of the individual and the greater
community. In unhealthy cycles, however, the system can get
hijacked by imbalances, whether genetic, stress-induced, or
chemical. This is what happens in our stress-loaded society,
where so many of us are conditioned to take pleasure in junk
food, drugs, and forms of entertainment that are ultimately bad
for our well-being and that of our community, not to mention
the planet’s.
But the body’s natural tendency is to treat pleasure as
a signal that you’re on the right track. Pleasure centers are
also sparked by a number of more-subtle activities, includingyoga, pranayama, and meditation; these evoke feelings such
as empathy, gratitude, and love. Research suggests that the
dopamine surges the brain experiences as rewarding are
stronger and last longer when the thoughts and actions that
set them off are eudaimonic—that is, kind, peaceful, generous,
and good for life itself. So brain science confirms something
else that the sages of yoga understood intuitively: Not only is
pleasure helpful to our survival, but it also has multiple levels—
relatively superficial layers and deeper ones. You get to deeper
levels of pleasure only by making an effort—to be fully present,
to exercise awareness, to act lovingly, to give up the strings that
the ego attaches to experience. And paradoxically, this often
demands that you move past what’s merely comfortable.
It’s not pleasure that opposes the good, it’s addiction to
comfort. This is an important idea that comes from the Mussar
school, a system of ethical wisdom training in the Jewish
tradition. This idea adds a powerful dimension to the pleasure
discussion, one that can help you understand more deeply
what texts such as the Katha Upanishad may have been getting
at. When the sage of the Katha Upanishad tells us that a wise
person will choose the good over the pleasant, he means that
the wise will choose the good over the merely comfortable. In
other words, the wise person will choose effort and depth over
laziness and superficiality.Going Deeper
In the yogic sense, the deepest delights comes from the greatest
depths. When you get inside the pleasure—through awareness,
deep savoring, or surrender—its divine quality becomes
apparent. This is true whether you take pleasure in chocolate,
lovemaking, an energetic vinyasa, or immersion in chanting.
To deeply experience the yoga of pleasure, it is helpful to
think of it in terms of five basic levels that range from relatively
superficial to extremely subtle: sensual pleasure, loving
intimacy, purposeful action, creativity, and immersion in spirit.
The subtler levels of pleasure are the richest and the closest to
what the Upanishad meant by “the good.” We often understand
this intuitively without putting it into words. What we don’t
always understand is that one of the marks of subtler pleasures
is that they require more effort, more practice. This is also true
of sensual pleasures, which can be powerful doorways into
subtler levels of awareness—if you are willing to practice them
mindfully.
Moreover, these levels I’ve described are not
interchangeable, which is one reason why, as human beings,
we need all of these kinds of pleasure—each has its own value
and its own gifts. But no amount of purely sensual pleasure—
good as it may be—will give you the experience of deep loving
intimacy, which is why it ultimately doesn’t work to make
sex or food stand in for love. (In other words, when you feel
lonely, call a friend instead of reaching for a piece of cake!) In
the same way, the joy of loving connection can’t substitute for
sexual pleasure, though it certainly enhances it. And loving