Yoga, addiction and discipline.
Luke please,
I have a question and if you don't mind to give your deep point of view it would be nice.🙂
So in this world of duality, balance between polarities seems to be a great key.
Discipline is often pointed at as being at the core of Ashtanga practice and needed to walk along a path of self development. Discipline has to be applied but does discipline reach sometimes its limits and have to be balanced? and if so how can we acknowledge there is too much of it?
many thanks.
“The sharper the knife the easier it is to dull” – Tao Te Ching.
Discipline is a word both revered and feared. We know that we need it in order to accomplish any goal of worth and yet we know, thanks to Jack Torrence, that all work and no play can make Jack a very dull boy! While we often admire those people who we consider disciplined, the word conjures up kind of seriousness, a stoic aloofness from the temptations of sensuality. We think of someone who says ‘no’ to the things of the world and instead imposes on themselves an asceticism (for higher noble purposes of course), a person, perhaps, who would not be first on your list to invite to a party.
In its more extreme forms we think of discipline as a kind of self-punishment or torture. We have all seen the images of self-flagellators whipping themselves into a frenzy, their bloody backs red and raw and streaming. Funnily enough even the whip they use is itself called ‘a discipline’. To me this kind of discipline is not a virtue – it is a pathology, a poison, a sickness. Strangely, proponents of this self-inflicted torture sometimes claim that their messianic masochism can induce a spiritual ecstasy.
But this ecstasy is no different from the street variety. It is, purely and simply, a drug. Pain in the right doses can produce chemically altered states similar to an opioid high. The endorphin and dopamine flooded altered states of consciousness being taken as higher, spiritual experiences are, in fact, just result of chemically addicted addicts chasing the dragon of a chimerical high.
The studios of the more extreme forms of yoga are full of these types. Faces grimaced, giving it everything, sweat pouring from every pore, getting into zone, until… at the end... the sweet release, the high, the stepping into the world fresh again and clear. I know, because, it was me.
Yoga made me feel like a superman. I heard the message ‘no pain, no gain’ and broke on through to the other side for my daily hit of the beyond. All the while I was being supported by a culture which celebrated this excess, a culture in which injuries (sorry, ‘openings’) were regarded as war wounds, badges of honour, the inevitable signs that one was a dedicated and committed soldier of the cause – the spiritual cause of liberation from suffering. The irony!
But in truth, just like the self-flagellating freaks, just like the junkie in the gutter, I had an addiction problem. “Well at least its a good addiction” was the common response I often heard people say, itself an acknowledgement of the problem. It could be that they had a point. Now, I’m not one who would wish to throw around any normative judgements but sweating for a couple of hours in an overheated yoga shala, taking the body to the edge of its possibilities is, I imagine, in some sense ‘better’ than risking overdose in some dingy dismal shooting gallery but, really, who I am to judge?
However, whether good or bad, an addiction is an addiction and addictions often have at their root a common source. That common source is said to be an underlying malaise – a trauma perhaps, a lack of self-worth, unexpressed pain. And so the addict self medicates, unconsciously seeking to feel something consciously other than those feelings that they have repressed to their unconscious. It may be through food, it may be through drink, through drugs, through social media, or even through yoga that one finds one’s ‘escape’.
The problem in yoga is exacerbated by the development of a super-ego that now constructs a narrative of spiritual superiority. One’s self-worth becomes dependent on keeping up the image of being ‘a yogi’ to oneself and others. Discipline/s are now maintained not only because they provide relief but also as part of a social game of virtue signalling and one-upmanship, a game of yoglier-than-thou.
Yet, there is no escape, there is no transcendence. There is no avoidance of being a messy human being. The flight towards the light of the spiritual sun will, sooner or later, lead to nothing other than the descent to earth where the work is to be done.
And this is what I have found after my life of yogic discipline, that I am, like everyone else, a human being with feelings to be seen and needs to be met. Sometimes I am clear and conscious about what these and my strategies for meeting them are, and, at other times, less so.
* * * * * * *
The word discipline also refers itself to a set of teachings. Just as the humanities are a discipline, that science is a discipline, in the same way, yoga is also a discipline. Rather than being an immovable monolith, however, something just to be accepted as a finished historical product, like these other disciplines, it is something in flux, ever-changing as we enter into a dialogue with it, questioning assumptions, opening to new ideas, finding out through our own experience what works and what doesn’t.
In so doing we become disciples. To be a disciple is to be one who opens to learning through listening, through awareness. This is not the same as becoming a apparatchik, an unimaginative rule-following preserver of tradition, like some kind of spiritual Hitler-youth prefect. No, to be a disciple is to listen to ones inner experience, one’s inner Guru as we play the game of exploration within the alchemical crucible of a fluid engagement with ‘the teachings’.
For me the purpose of this is not to walk along a path of self-development as if we had in mind an idea of what the finished product should look like. By taking on and implementing authority-given ideas of how we ‘should’ be and develop, we hand over our innate intelligence and power, the access to the inner voice of intuition. In chasing after ideas of how we should be, we lose touch with who we are. God save us from these experts whose constant advise in our own best interests will slowly kill us with kindness. Imposing on ourselves these ideas, in trying in the impossible task to match up to societal expectations, either real or imagined, we, at the same time, simply reinforce any underlying feelings of not being good enough, not being worthy as being inferior.
Nowadays I see practice, instead of being a path of self-development, as being a play of self discovery. On a good day it is a moment-by-moment re-membering of the breath-body-mind connection done for no other reason than it feels good, because it is enjoyed and enjoyable.
The world has had enough of ‘should’. With this whip of discipline we have been flogging ourselves for too long. This whip handed to us by societies’ authorities and those conditioned by them, this whip designed to mould us into nice, dead citizens, this whip which keeps us enslaved in continual self-doubting suffering, this whip a most powerful tool of the dominator culture, we can hand back again. Let’s be done with this most violent of words and practice the ahimsa being our own authorities, of standing in our own true forms, the ultimate arbiters of what is for us appropriate and inappropriate.
Without this word ‘should’ practice becomes not an imposition but a pleasure. We become free of the cult-like creeds handed down from the high-priests of tradition who inculcate within us the whys and wherefores of what is to be observed. Instead the power of our own observation becomes the law. We know what is good for us, and what is not good for us. The body’s intelligence doesn’t lie. If only we were to listen to it rather than the impositions we overlay on top.
This for me is the path of practice – a path of being a disciple of oneself within the discipline we call yoga. I choose how much or how little I do. I choose what to practice and what to not. I choose when to practice, when to take rest. And while I am the ultimate authority and arbiter of what is right for me I still maintain much respect for and gratitude for having the discipline of Ashtanga Yoga in my life. It remains the framework which forms the foundation of what I do most days. Not because it is has been handed down from some God-on-High or from some spotless Golden Guru, but because it works for me. I enjoy it on many levels, it meets many of my needs. I enjoy it as a living cultural form, a means of bodily exploration and expression, I enjoy the community it helps to foster and appreciate it as a medium through which I have the opportunity to share this voice and these reverent irreverent thoughts.
