61
february / march 2018yogajournal.com.sg3 KAMA
4 MOKSHA
PLEASURE
FREEDOM
ACCORDING TO ROD STRYKER,
kama, or the desire for pleasure,
is what makes the world go
round. “Desire for pleasure is what
drives all human behavior,” he
says. “Kama can be sensuality,
but it’s also art, beauty, intimacy,
fellowship, and kindness—it’s
what brings a sense of delight to
our lives. There can be pleasure
even in sacrifice.”
Kama gets some bad press,
Stryker notes, possibly because
it’s the purushartha most likely
to run amok. Excessive kama can
lead to overindulgence, addiction,sloth, greed, and a whole host
of other “deadly sins.” But it is
good, and indeed necessary,
when it exists to support dharma.
“If we set kama in the context of
dharma, we understand it to be a
part of the richness of life,” Stryker
says. “Every accomplishment has
been sought for the pleasure that
it provides. We live in service to
a higher purpose, but along that
path there is the pleasure we take
from family and friends, art, love,
and harmony in the world around
us.” Brooks agrees, saying that
whether we deal with it skillfullyor not, there is no life without
kama.
Shining the light of awareness
on your desires can help you
focus on the ones that honor
the true essence of life. “The
conscious pursuit of kama is a
profound yogic practice,” Kempton
says. “To practice kama yogically
means to practice being fully
present with whatever you’re
experiencing. There are many
levels of pleasure, from eating
a pizza to finding a meditation
practice that allows your heart to
expand. As a yogi, you learnto distinguish. You know
which pleasures are saturated with
consciousness and are drenched
in the ecstasies of the soul, and
which ones leave you depleted
or lying to yourself about what is
really going on.”
Brooks notes that focusing
on the right kinds of pleasure can
lead you toward your dharma—
and help you fulfill it with passion.
“Passion is never the problem,”
he says. “Passion is the solution.”
Find your own solution by
inquiring deeply about your own
pursuit of pleasure.MOKSHA, OR LIBERATION, is widely considered to be the
pinnacle of the purusharthas. In its broadest, most elevated
sense, moksha means achieving nirvana, or the complete
liberation from the cycle of incarnation. “Moksha is about
getting off the wheel of samsara [the cycle of suffering caused
by birth, death, and rebirth],” Kempton explains. “You can be
a good person who is living a dharmic life, taking care of
yourself and your family, enjoying your family life and your
career, but all of that will be ultimately unsatisfying unless you
are also doing the practices that can lead to moksha.”
Yet moksha doesn’t have to be some other place and
time or some exalted state to be reached only once and to
the exclusion of the human experience. “The question with
moksha is whether it is a goal or whether it is your nature,”
says Brooks. “In other words, do you become free or are you
born free?
One view is that moksha is a kind of otherworldliness—
the opposite of dharma. The other argument is that freedom
is your nature, that it’s here and now. Every time you look
into a baby’s eyes, you get a hit of moksha. You don’t feel
confined by that responsibility of being a parent; you feel that
it offers you the deepest sense of your own freedom and
choice.
Simply taking time to remember your own inherent
freedom, in other words, gives meaning to your dharma—
and everything you do. Practicing yoga, in a very real sense,