Healthy Living Club

Many people in the yoga world these days seem to be confused about desire and its relationship to spirituality. A lot of yogis are under the impression that the more you desire, the less spiritual you are, and the more you grow spiritually, the less you’ll desire. According to this logic, sincere yogis should strive to detach themselves from all desires and one day get to the point where they want nothing at all. But do the teachings of yoga really suggest that all desire comes from our “lower nature” or that all our urges must be written off as nonspiritual? Is desire, in the context of spirituality, at best the equivalent of a dog chasing its tail, and at worst, a pathway to spiritual bankruptcy?

To get some clarity on this issue, it may help to ask yourself why you began yoga in the first place. The answer, of course, is desire: You wanted something. Maybe you wanted to get rid of a nagging pain in your lower back or loosen your chronically tight shoulders; maybe a health care professional suggested you do yoga to help you slow down and de-stress.

Perhaps you were seeking to ease some emotional pain or heartache; perhaps you hoped to find more equanimity so you’d be less likely to snap at your children or an annoying coworker. Maybe you even longed for more internal silence so you could hear the quiet voice of intuition and conscience.

More than 2000 years ago the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most beloved and elegant Indian sacred texts, recognized that there were four major reasons that people sought out yoga. From lowest to highest, the Gita ranked these into four categories: the desire to reduce pain, the desire to feel better, the desire to gain power (internal and external) over our lives, and finally, the desire to achieve spiritual discrimination.

Clearly, the Gita implies that desire and the spiritual life are not mutually exclusive. In fact, aspiration is always a necessary step before you can realize a better pose, a better breath, a better you.

Consider the legacies left by Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, none of whom could be called unimpassioned. Each demonstrated how an individual can better the world simply through the power of aspiration and will. All noble actsnd all works of art, both great and not so greatrise out of a deep and sometimes powerful urge. Throughout history, many highly spiritually realized men and women have left keen evidence that a close relationship to God makes one anything but passive and unproductive.

In nature desire is all-pervasive. Note the zeal of salmon swimming upstream to spawn, the growth of giant redwoods reaching for sunlight, the drive of birds migrating thousands of miles.

Below the level of our perception, the material plane is entirely based on molecular and subatomic attraction and repulsion. Desire is the motivating force that endows all beings with the gift of life. After all, neither you nor I would be here if it weren’t for the desire of our parents and the attraction between one egg and one sperm.

Sitting at my desk on a late afternoon in September, I watch the sunlight as it bounces off the leaves of the trees in front of my window, cascades down the serpentine steps leading to my office, and merges with the shade on the roof of the house next door against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. This is the first day I can feel the coming fall through the differences in how the light manifests on familiar surroundings, and I am in awe of the beauty of the light’s shadings and endless patterns and keenly aware of its fleeting nature. Between now and the end of the year, I will go through a similar experience each day as though the light were somehow part of me, yet outside me, the way a breeze feels on the face or the way water feels against the skin when sinking into a warm bath.The changing pattern of the light reflects the cycle of the seasons and reminds us of the preciousness of our own time. You may, as many do, feel a personal response to the fading light, experiencing it as a call for endings and the need for new beginnings. Do you find yourself resolving to make major changes in your work, your home life, or in yourself as the winter solstice approaches? Most people do, although they may not be conscious of doing so. Sometimes these reassessments are merely daydreams or just banal musings, but other times, they are your inner voice speaking and attention should be paid.

If you watch closely, you may discover that your own life is part of this seasonal pattern of endings and beginnings. In early fall, you externally focus on finishing up tasks with a burst of energy, followed by delving into your internal experience as the days get shorter and the darkness lasts longer. This pattern mirrors that of other living creatures on Earth as they prepare for winter and then hibernate until the warmth returns, reflecting the cycle of the Earth itself around the sun. In our cultural preoccupation with New Year’s resolutions, we make a clich?out of this profound biorhythmic activity. It is our weak attempt to acknowledge this seasonal pattern and to consciously participate in its natural rhythm.

So how can you honor and work with this arising desire to make changes in your life that occurs this time of year? To do so you must acknowledge that the call for changes may be larger than your ego identity and therefore may be arising from impulses you don’t fully understand. Yet you must find a way to consciously and skillfully participate in allowing the new to emerge. Bookstores are full of books whose authors want to tell you how to do this, from the most sacred aspects of your life to the mundane. These books promise to help you find a spiritual direction, shape up your body, get a new job, and overcome your shortcomings as a lover, parent, and friend.

Some of these books are really quite useful. But there is another, more fundamental perspective based on the teachings of the Buddha that can help you directly explore the feelings that arise within you and understand why you want to alter some aspect of your life. Think of it as the Dharma of life changeshe practice of bringing mindfulness to the longings and impulses that lead you to make major life changes. Mindfulness provides a method for consciously and skillfully working with the complexity of moving in new directions in your life.

Ego, a friend of mine likes to say, is the devil. She talks about ego the way fundamentalists talk about sin, and she blames it for all the qualities she dislikes in herself—envy, the burning need to get credit for every favor she does, and the fear that her boyfriend doesn’t love her as much as he loved his ex. But no matter how hard she fights it, with long hours of meditation or purifying diets, it stubbornly refuses to disappear. And she has begun to see that fighting the ego is like trying to outrun her own shadow—the more she tries to escape it, the more it sticks to her.

It’s a paradox yogis have been grappling with for eons: The ego, which loves any form of self-improvement, is especially eager to take on projects for getting rid of itself. It will earnestly set itself up to get bashed, and then pop up like a piece of half-toasted bread, as if to say, “Look at me, haven’t I practically disappeared?”

In fact, a really sophisticated ego is a master at disguising itself. It may show up as your feeling of injustice or as the smooth voice of yogic detachment telling you there’s no point in indulging a friend’s emotional neediness. The ego can even pretend it’s the inner witness and watch itself endlessly while smugly congratulating itself on having escaped its own traps.

All these tricks make it challenging to address what you may think is your ego problem. Moreover, from the ultimate point of view, the ego doesn’t actually exist. Buddhist and Vedantic teachers are fond of saying that the ego is like the blue of the sky, or the apparent puddle in the middle of a desert-dry highway. It’s an optical illusion, a simple mistake in the way we identify ourselves. That’s why fighting your ego is like boxing with your reflection in the mirror, or trying to rid yourself of something you don’t have. Now that neurobiologists seem to have reduced the sense of I-ness to a couple of brain chemicals, the ego looks more than ever to be a kind of involuntary mechanism, something beyond our personal control, just like the reflex that makes us go on breathing when we sleep.

But even though the ego may ultimately be illusory, in the world of our daily lives it performs important functions. The yogic texts define ego somewhat differently than Western psychology does, but they agree with Western psychologists that one of the ego’s tasks is to keep our boundaries as individuals. In Sanskrit, the word for ego is ahamkara, which means “the I maker.” Ego differentiates among the mass of sensations that come your way and tells you that a particular experience belongs to the energy bundle you call “me.” When a truck comes hurtling down the street, ego tells you that it’s “you” who should get out of the way. Ego also collects your experiences, like the time you stood up in fifth-grade assembly to sing a solo of “A Very Precious Love” and got booed. Then, the ego will compare a current moment to what happened in the past, so the next time you’re tempted to sing a love song in front of a bunch of 10-year-olds, something will tell you to forget it. This is ego’s most basic job.

Unfortunately, ego likes to extend its portfolio. Its memory function, for example, can grab on to bad experiences and turn them into a negative feedback loop—so painful memories get lodged inside you and become crippling blocks in your body and brain. That’s part of the downside of ego: the ego as “false identification.”

Fighting Your False Identity

Cindy, a student of mine who works in a brokerage house, has been reeling in the realm of false identification. Surrounded by highly competitive men and women with M.B.A.s from Stanford and Wharton, she feels as if she’s in a daily dogfight, and losing. Her colleagues steal her clients, take credit for her successes, and bad-mouth her to superiors. Every day she feels more discouraged and deflated. Since Cindy’s ego identifies itself as a yogi and a nice girl, it tells her that she’s not supposed to fight for anything so ephemeral as success.

But this is her career, after all. So she feels doubly angry with herself—angry because she’s failing at her job as well as angry because she resents the people who are doing well. To make it worse, she intuits that she has as bad an ego problem as her colleagues. Their egos are inflated and sharky, while hers is deflated and timid. (Even in her deflated state, though, she still feels morally superior to them, a sure sign that there’s some inflation going on!) The point is that all of them are being driven by identification with a false self. And Cindy, like the rest of us, would be a lot happier if she could get some distance from it.

Some years ago people used to wear a T-shirt printed with the slogan, “Life is difficult, and then you die.” I once asked a group of people at a yoga retreat what they thought when they read those words. One person found it funny way to laugh at the hard truth of life rather than be overwhelmed by it. Another read it as justification for taking what pleasure you could out of life, while still another saw it as cynical and nihilistic, an excuse to give up. Someone who was active in a spiritual group said it was a call to action much like the Buddha’s teaching of suffering contained in the Four Noble Truths.I asked for their thoughts because I wanted to see if anyone would say it wasn’t true, which no one did. My own experience was that the slogan is composed of a half truth and also a full truth, but one that obscures rather than clarifies. The half truth is that indeed “life is difficult,” but it is not just difficult, it is also incredibly wonderful, puzzling, and routine, all in an ever-changing cycle.

“Then we die” is also true, but stating the truth in this manner implies that death is simply a personal failure. To me death is not a failure but rather a necessary part of the life cycle of being incarnate. Imagine if plants didn’t die, or if the note of a piano didn’t fade into oblivion, or if a thought didn’t arise and pass. Life would come to a standstill; it would drown in its own accumulation. Therefore, rather than viewing life and death as separate, I see them as part of one continuous, mysterious experience of redemption and renewal. Spiritual practices provide a means to relate to this experience in its mystery and vastness.

Still, there remained in my mind the all-important issue that the words on the T-shirt implied: If life is difficult and brief, how do we cope? How do we find meaning or happiness? I had already repeatedly explored these questions using different spiritual traditions and later came to devote my life full-time to this inquiry. Though not always finding answers, my explorations slowly led to certain discoveries about what makes life a struggle.

One of these discoveries is the degree to which we make life difficult for ourselves by being violent or violating to the body and the mind in the routine of our daily lives. Through the way in which we schedule our time, push our bodies, and compare and judge ourselves against others, we repeatedly create an inner environment that is filled with violence. If you can understand that this is so, it may have a profound impact on your experience of life being difficult.

Initially, you may not identify some of your daily thoughts and decisions as moments of violence to self, but most likely they are. If someone was hitting you in your stomach, squeezing your neck, or not letting you breathe, you’d quickly call such behavior violent. Yet when these same painful sensory experiences arise in reaction to your own thoughts or actions, you fail to recognize your behavior as violent. In your daily life, have you not repeatedly experienced these bodily sensations or others like them?

I am conducting an interview at a meditation retreat. Seated across from me is a woman in her mid-30s, smart and articulate, but agitated from her experiences on the cushion. Knowing nothing else about her, can you tell me the inner yearning that possesses her and shapes her behavior moment by moment?he one thing that will be most useful to me in helping her deepen her meditation practice? It’s so simple, so obvious, yet it’s usually overlooked. Like all human beings, she just wants to be happy.

Certainly happiness for her might mean something that would never bring you joy. But however you define it, each of us wants a happy life. Many people, myself included, find the word “happiness” inadequate for conveying what it is that motivates them. We often substitute different terms? meaningful or spiritually fulfilling life, one that is peaceful or useful, or a life filled with inner freedom, love, family, creativity, or authenticity. But no matter what term we use, we really mean the same thing?n inner experience that is deeply satisfying. This was one of the insights that the Buddha taught as a cornerstone for understanding why things unfold as they do in each person’s life.

The woman in the interview knew she was dissatisfied, but she could not understand why she was unhappy when she was so successful in her life. Sitting in meditation provided her with her first opportunity to actually feel her frustration and had given rise to a question. Maybe her question is the same as yours: If all your actions are based on the pursuit of happiness, why is it that so many things you do seem to yield anything but happiness?

The Buddha spoke to this question in many ways during the 40 years he wandered around India teaching, but his core message was that of clinging and nonclinging. If something good happens, you have a reflexive tendency to try to hold on to it, and if something bad happens, you have a tendency to push it away. Likewise, if you see something you like, you move towards it; or if something is distasteful, you pull away. This clinging response is inevitable if you believe yourself to be the same as or the “owner of” all the desires and fears that arise in you. You become trapped in an endless web of tension and contraction.

The Buddha taught that for most people life is just this way: The good things either go away, lose their appeal, or never happen, while the bad things come despite your best efforts. So when you try to manage your life by clinging and aversion, you are left dissatisfied, uneasy, or without a sense of meaning or wholeness. Moreover, being identified with the clinging Self and its endless wants and fears means that even when things are going well, there is no room to breathe, to experience the spontaneous joy that is the basis of happiness. Every day becomes a tally sheet of gains and losses; the bountiful mind shrinks, reduced to being an inner bookkeeper huddled over an account ledger of what is to be held and what is to be discarded.

The yoga class was just beginning, and I had not been coming for very long. I was pretty much in my own world and concerned with getting myself set up properly. The class was a little late getting started, and we were all lined up expectantly on blue sticky mats, like overgrown preschoolers ready for nap time. Ready with blocks, blankets, and belts, we waited for the teacher to gather himself into his leading role.

I was fond of this before-the-beginning beginning; it was a between-state, a bardo, a passageway from one world to the next. Dressed in our yoga clothes, we could be anybody, or nobody, but we were unmistakably ourselves. I could not even see very well, having left my glasses and keys askew in my shoes at the back of the Manhattan studio. The feeling in the room was anxious but cautiously optimistic, as it is in the therapy office when a new but eager patient has just come in, before she has told me much of her story. I like this period because of how unstructured but brief it is; it never goes on long enough for me to start getting anxious but gives me a needed respite from the rest of my structured day. As when flying between cities in an airplane, I am suspended for a time. The remnants of my outside life can settle down before the tasks of this inside practice take over.

I do not intend this to be mean, but I was taken aback by what happened next. (The unconscious knows no negatives, I was taught when studying Freud. If someone tells me they don’t mean to offend me, I know they probably do.) Nothing out of the ordinary really happened. The new yoga teacher sat down in the front of the class and took a deep breath. He told us to sit up straight and close our eyes. He sang a mantra and asked us to chant it back to him. It was not an unfamiliar mantra, but something in his tone disturbed my reverie. What was it? I wondered. He was only chanting Om, for goodness sake. But something else was coming through the sound, an insistent quality, not quite a demand but an expectation.

I felt a wall going up around me and noticed that he got a tepid response from the class. “It’s not just me,” I consoled myself; other people had also contracted. He continued, bravely, but his song had more of that unrelenting tone. He wanted something from us, all right. It was there in his voice. I was reminded of visiting a friend in Minneapolis and walking around one of the lakes with her one summer afternoon. Everyone we passed was so resolutely cheerful, I had trouble believing they were real. Their greetings seemed to carry an implicit demand that I be cheerful in return. Our yoga teacher had a similar agenda for us, and the class did not appreciate it.

The teacher only repeated the mantra three times; the whole thing was not a big deal. It would have been nice if we had come around and started to sing and turned it into something positive, a big exhalation, but we did not do so. A few people ventured a response. I did not give much of one. I thought back to another teacher’s chanting, though. Her class was the first I ever attended and her singing, too, caught me off-guard; it had never occurred to me that there would be chanting during a lunch-time yoga class.

Who are you? Never mind all your fears and insecurities or all the things you have or would like to have. Forget that you want to be a better person. I don’t want to know your gender, nationality, age, family situation, ethnic background, and certainly not what you do for a living. My question is this: What is your true nature? Do you know? Do you ever ask yourself? Do you use your yoga and meditation practice to explore this question? I’m not asking who you believe yourself to be, but rather what you experience in those moments when you are not caught up in your wants and fears. What do you rely on to give meaning to your life? These are hard yet essential questions for those who wish to consciously experience life’s fullness.

Even if you never consciously grapple with these questions about your true nature, certain circumstances will require you to pay attention. Life delivers you a series of challenges in the form of small and large good fortune, as well as petty and great misfortune. In the struggle to learn how to respond to the resulting joy, pain, and confusion, you are repeatedly challenged to seek and to act from your essence.

Sometimes it’s easier to grasp the importance of knowing your true nature through hearing the story of someone else, particularly if that person’s story is larger than life. One clear example of this can be seen in a recent New York Times article about how Germany has renamed a military base to honor a World War II army sergeant. This particular sergeant, Anton Schmid, an Austrian serving in the German army, saved more than 250 Jews from extermination. He disobeyed his superior officers and helped these men, women, and children escape by hiding them and supplying them with false identification papers. Sergeant Schmid was executed by the Nazis for his acts.

Sergeant Schmid’s actions reveal the wonderment and pain of what it means to realize one’s true nature. While in prison waiting to be executed, Schmid wrote to his wife of the horror of seeing children beaten as they were herded into ghettos to be shot: “You know how it is with my soft heart. I could not think and had to help them.” These words capture the sudden blossoming of spiritual maturity brought on by a challenge we would all rather never have to face.

In one of life’s many paradoxes, witnessing the Nazis’ acts of inhumanity was the gift that opened Schmid to a deep, spontaneous realization of his true nature and led to his self-sacrificing actions. I don’t mean something extraordinary by this, but rather the ordinary humanness of his act.

What he did was simply help people who were being brutally mistreated. This impulse to spontaneously help seems to arise out of the essence of human nature. It happens millions of times each day among family members, friends, and even between complete strangers. But Schmid’s story stands out because so few others came to the aid of Germany’s Jews in those terrible years, and because it not only meant his death but also that he died a traitor in the eyes of his government.

The shuttle was late picking us up. We had waited until our second-to-last day in Australia to go scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef and had been rewarded with pure blue skies, a mellow breeze, and zero indication of rain. But wey mother, father, and Iad been standing by the front gate of the B&B for 30 minutes, and there was no sign of a bus. Afraid I would miss my long-awaited chance to dive, I was growing anxious and irritable. I pleaded with Kathy, our warm and absent-minded Australian innkeeper, to check on our ride. “We’ve straightened it out, dear!” she shouted extravagantly to me and my mother, who was sitting by the pool. “We’ve called a taxi!”

“I’m not worried,” said my mother, the emergency room nurse. As usual, she wasn’t. But worrying, that all-encompassing desire to order the world and prevent its catastrophes, has always come naturally to me. I was worried too, about diving, afraid of the simple, confounding act of breathing underwater.

Despite nearly a decade of yoga practice, I don’t consider myself a good breather. Exhalationshe most basic act of letting gore difficult for me. Glimpsing the truth in the traditional wisdom that practicing pranayama improperly can lead to severe distress or even madness, I become agitated when asked to lengthen my exhalation and pause before the inhalation in pranayamao take less yet give more.

Ready or Not

Once aboard the Seahorse, we were asked to fill out medical info and waiver forms. I went down the list checking the “No” boxes until I hit the question about fainting and put a little check under “Yes.” When I handed my form to Craig, the blond, sunburned, Ray Ban-wearing dive instructor who had the requisite aura of fun about him, he said, “You going to go to sleep on me?”

“I faint,” I said, “when I’m hot or nauseous…” and called my mother over to give Craig the right terminology. “Tell the doctor it’s vaso-vagal-induced fainting,” she said confidently. “If he were to examine her, he wouldn’t find anything wrong.”

I wasn’t so sure. Until I saw Craig running back along the dock bearing the good news that the doctor had given me a thumbs-up, I passed the minutes trying to let go of my very desire to dive.

Despite the crew’s spirited attempts to amuse us on the way out to Upolu Cay with jokes like “If the boat begins to sink, start negotiating with one of us for a life vest,” I was completely focused on getting to Upolu, the coral atoll that was our dive destination. Two hours after leaving the harbor, we finally anchored.

With the passing of the so-called “sexual revolution,” the consensus seems to be that sexuality is no longer the centerpiece of neurosis. “Money is the new sexuality,” I’ve heard people say. “It is the one thing we don’t talk about, even in therapy.” But in my experience, there is no such thing as a new sexuality. The new one is the same as the old one, tarnished a bit by the assumption that we should be beyond all this by now.

As a psychiatrist to people with spiritual aspirations, I am witness to some of the ways in which spirituality and sexuality interact, not always to either of their benefits. Freud once said that sexuality contained a “divine spark,” but his indefatigable promotion of the instinctual components of desire has done much to remove its connection to the sublime. The recent surge of interest in Tantric sexuality has sought to reestablish that lost connection. There is a groundswell of attention to aspects of sexual relations often overlooked in our culture of immediate gratification. In most portrayals of sexual yoga, for example, the man is encouraged to give priority to his partner’s arousal rather than his own. Both people are urged to bring pleasurable feelings upward from their genitals to the heart and head, prolonging their intermingling while allowing sexual bliss to course through mind and body. In a reversal of the usual sexual dynamic, men are urged to absorb the female secretions—to drink their bliss—rather than ejaculating.

In actual practice, most of the popular seminars and literature on Tantric sex seem to be oriented toward helping people over their sexual inhibitions. Men are given something other than their own release to focus on, and women are affirmed in the richness and complexity of their sexual response. Yet there is no denying the changes in attitude that these efforts encourage. A movement is afoot to reclaim the sacred quality of sexual relations, to rescue it from the language of instinct and from the commercial exploitation of Madison Avenue. People want something more from their sexual lives, and they are turning to the East for a reminder of what that might be. In a new book called Darwin’s Worms (Basic Books, 2000), the British child psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes of Freud’s discussions of desire in a way that suggests that Freud knew more of Tantra than we might have suspected.

Phillips retells a story of Freud’s from an often overlooked paper called “On Transience.” In this vignette, Freud told of walking in the countryside with two friends who were resolutely unmoved by the beauty of all that surrounded them. Freud was puzzled by their failure to open and began to analyze what their problem might be. It was the transience of the physical world that was unnerving his friends, he decided. They were guarding themselves against a feeling of sadness that was an indivisible part of appreciation. Like a lover who has been hurt one too many times, Freud’s friends were keeping themselves unapproachable. They were stuck in a state of abbreviated, or interrupted, mourning. Unable to embrace the object of their desire, they retreated to a sullen and unapproachable place.

Author of The Berlin Stories, which inspired the musical Cabaret, Christopher Isherwood also wrote a series of books resulting from his decades-long involvement with the U.S.-based Vedanta sect affiliated with Swami Vivekananda, who introduced yoga to the West in 1893. Born in England in 1904, Isherwood moved in 1939 to Los Angeles, where he was introduced to Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society. Devoutly anti-religion (the word “made me wince and grit my teeth with loathing”), Isherwood nonetheless took to the Vedanta philosophy. Vedanta Press later published Isherwood-Prabhavananda translations of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra (How to Know God, 1953) and the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God, 1944), as well as Isherwood’s Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965). After the swami’s death in 1976, Isherwood wrote a candid, touching account of their relationship, My Guru and His Disciple (North Point, 1996). In a sense his life’s work—he died in 1986, having written 20 books—followed from his early adoption of a witnessing self, as in his famous quote, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Intent on seeing the real, both within and without, he helped countless others do the same.