42 YOGA JOURNAL
WISDOMCan’t Stop the Feeling
DUET POSTSCRIPTUM/STOCKSYEmbrace life’s pleasures. They have the potential to
lead you to the highest of joys: inhabiting your true Self.
BY SALLY KEMPTONA woman named Rita called me recently in a mild panic. She’s
a committed vegan who has followed a strict diet for the past five
years. But for several months, she’d been craving—and eating—
ice cream, pizza, and other foods she normally avoids. She worried
that she was falling into self-indulgence.
My immediate intuition was that her system was seeking
balance. If you’re healthy, craving a particular form of pleasure is
often a sign that you’ve gone too far in abstaining from it. That’s
true whether it’s sweets, love, or deep practice.
But Rita isn’t the only yogi I know who gets confused
about the line between pleasure and self-indulgence. It’s
understandable, because yoga traditions are somewhat split
on the subject of pleasure. Some, especially classical andVedantic yoga, see a basic contradiction between yoga and
enjoyment. This viewpoint is summed up in a famous verse in the
Katha Upanishad, a text of Vedantic yoga: “Both the good and the
pleasurable approach a person. The wise choose the good over
the pleasurable.”
Generations of practitioners have taken this as a call to seek
the bare concrete floor rather than the cushy rug—celibacy rather
than coupling. (Perhaps it would be more to the point to interpret
the statement as encouragement to choose your early-morning
practice over an extra hour of sleep!) Concrete floors aside, there’s
truth in the text, especially if you substitute the phrase “comfort
zone” for “pleasure.” Transformation does require you to be willing
to move past what’s comfortable.