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SUMMER 2009

NAMASTE,

Recently I was teaching at a weeklong yoga gathering where each day the students participated in a two hour morning class and an hour and a half afternoon class. This is not an unusual schedule as weeklong yoga retreats go. Three and a half hours of yoga every day is, however, significantly more time than most people spend on their usual (or unusual) daily (or not so daily) practice.

Toward the end of the week, I happened to hear secondhand about a conversation between two of the participants, a couple. The gist of their discussion revolved around the idea that taking a week away from their lives at home to spend days lolling in the sun and doing three and a half hours of yoga a day was extremely self-indulgent. My first thought was, “ Hey, of course you’re being self-indulgent. You’re on vacation!” But what stuck in my mind was their subsequent insistence that spending hours each day practicing yoga even when you’re not on vacation is self-indulgent.

It is a question I have contemplated off and on over the years. Are we who practice yoga regularly and for extended time (whatever that is) each day just self-absorbed narcissists who should be spending our time in more productive pursuits? Are we self-obsessed navel-gazers who ought to get off our mats and do something meaningful, something truly worthwhile in the world? Are we shirking or even hiding from more important, more essential aspects of real life?

And the answer I’ve come up with is: maybe, maybe not. It all depends.

What it depends on are several number of different factors, the first being why we’re doing all this yoga practice in the first place. (Let’s at this point stipulate that what I’m talking about here is a daily practice of at least an hour or more. If you’re of the opinion that taking a half hour or so four times a week to do yoga in order to get a little exercise and relaxation is self-indulgent, then we’re on different planets, at least for the purpose of this discussion anyway.)

Many (probably most) people who practice regularly do so for physical reasons. They want to stretch out tight muscles, build up strength (Yes, yoga can do that!), mend a sore back (that, too), help with indigestion, lose some weight, and on and on. That’s why I originally got into yoga nearly forty years ago. This is the only body I’ve got and I want to take care of it. Good physical health is still an important element of why I practice even now.

Others practice to help deal with the stress of life. This is, of course, not far removed from taking care of yourself physically since stress has both physical and mental components. But learning to relax, to quiet the busy-ness that goes on in your head, to let go even for a while of the strains of work and family, is a crucial aspect of your well-being. It’s interesting to note how much advertising on television is directed toward stress related issues: sleeping pills, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications - all sorts of stuff to get us through the day and night. It certainly seems that taking some time each day to relax, to de-stress, would be time well spent and preferable to endless medications or nail-biting desperation.

Some of us practice yoga because we actually enjoy it. Yoga can help us feel good, it is interesting, and it can challenge and inform us on a lot of levels.

These all seem like sensible reasons for maintaining a committed daily yoga practice of an hour or more and not inherently self-indulgent. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that practicing yoga for these reasons is a responsible approach to taking care of some of the essential requirements of a fulfilling, healthy life: exercise, relaxation, and recreation.

There are ways in which a yoga practice can be what I would consider self-indulgent, however.

Each of us has created a life that involves, to varying degrees, some responsibility to other people: family, friends, colleagues, neighbors. When our practice interferes with our fulfilling the responsibilities that we have taken on, then I think we are being self-indulgent. This is not, however, a clear-cut, simple situation. Some of us are inclined to over commit ourselves, and in so doing, leave ourselves no time for important parts of life: essential parts such as sleeping, eating properly, relaxing; and vital parts such as interacting with the people in our life. In some cases this is unavoidable. Parents of newborns are notoriously fully occupied with caring for their baby. Many new parents who are committed yoga students come to speak with me shortly after their child is born. They tell me, in guilty tones, that they have no time to practice like they used to and ask what they should do. My advice is unequivocal. Their primary obligation is to take care of the needs of their baby. That is now their yoga practice, and they should attend to it fully and enthusiastically. And it’s not that they have to give up their asana practice altogether. When this question was put to Mr. Iyengar at his talk here in 2005, he said you do what you can. Stand in Tree Pose (Vrksasana) while you’re cooking your rice. Lie on your back with your legs up the wall when your baby falls asleep. Do what formal practice you can within the confines of honoring your responsibility to your child. Folks caring for elderly parents or seriously ill family members or friends have similar constraints on their time and thus on their formal practice.

In other cases, though, some of us try to take on way more than is wise or even possible. We overextend ourselves and set up a situation in which we can neither practice nor honor our commitments adequately. This in itself seems to me to be a form of self-indulgence. Ironically, your yoga practice can help you with the challenge of integrating practice with the rest of your life by providing you with a quiet time and some clarity to examine what commitments you are making in your life, whether they are important and realistic, and how they and your practice can intersect in ways that enhance both.

Another way your practice can be self-indulgent is by your using it to avoid unpleasant parts of your life. All of us need a break from our daily routines and the demands of day-to-day existence every now and then. (Hence yoga vacations!) But to keep slipping away to your mat every time a difficult interaction with your partner or child comes up or the bills need to be paid or a report is due is escapism and antithetical to what yoga is all about. Basically, the point of yoga practice and what makes yoga, yoga, is to awaken to what is real in your existence, whether it is the tightness of your hamstrings, the fear that lurks behind your actions, or the love you feel when you let go and accept what’s before you. We indulge ourselves in the worst way when we use our practice to hide from ourselves and the lives we’ve made.

A different way we can be self-indulgent with our practice is to use it as means of self-gratification and self-delusion. A few years back I was teaching Supta Padangushtasana in class. (You lie on your back, stretch one leg up, and using your hand or a strap, catch the raised leg foot and pull the leg toward you. Big hamstring stretch.) I noticed one lady with her knee slightly bent , distractedly glancing about, barely moving her leg. I asked her what she was doing and why she wasn’t stretching her leg, and she said, "I’m nurturing myself." My response to her was that there was a big difference between nurturing yourself and indulging yourself. Going through the motions, half-hearted effort, avoiding any semblance of discomfort, pursuing only what is immediately pleasurable, these are all traits of self-indulgence. They can occur in a yoga practice just as they can occur in any aspect of your life. If that’s what your practice is about, then, yes, it is self-indulgent. But if you’re spending an hour or two a day in formal practice with the intention of bringing yourself to a state of good health, quiet equanimity, and clear, awakened vision, then it is self-knowledge that is happening, not self-indulgence, and I think we as a culture and as a species could use a lot more of it.

       

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