Can't Stop The Feeling

Embrace life’s pleasures. They have the potential to lead you to the highest of joys: inhabiting your true Self.

- Sally Kempton

A 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 and Vedantic 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 an 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.