 The new year is now well underway and many of us wrote down our new year’s resolutions. These goals are surprisingly similar from one American to another, as chronicled in numerous newspapers and magazines. The most common resolutions include weight loss and fitness, budget and debt reduction, giving up drinking and smoking, learning something new, reducing stress, increasing time spent with family and friends, travel, engaging in service and growing spiritually. Self-improvement, it seems, is alive and well in the United States.
But as exciting as it often is to make that list of resolutions, by the time February rolls around, many of us haven’t looked at it again. Our new exercise clothes may still be neatly folded, or worse, our new running shoes may still be in the box. Our gym membership that isn’t being used may be impacting our resolution to spend more wisely this year.
As a yoga teacher, I often see an influx of new students in January. Excited to begin something new, they come to class with fresh mats that smell like glue and have to be painstakingly unrolled. These students often stop me after class and ask for additional yoga resources. What books can they read? What DVDs can they buy? I get e-mails relating their mountaintop moments with this new practice, and then … silence. I don’t see them in class any more. I may get an initial e-mail explaining what craziness has erupted in their life; it usually ends with an estimated date of their return to class. Most often, the return date comes and goes without me seeing or hearing from them again. I know that this experience isn’t unique to me, as all my friends who teach yoga have story after story with the same exact ending. As with any other resolution—fitness or otherwise—the newness wears off a yoga practice and we go back to our comfortable ways of living.
Retreating When Faced by Obstacles
And that, I have come to believe, is the bane of behavioral change. For as much as we laud the American spirit of adventure and our willingness to take courage, break new ground, and do something difficult, most of us far prefer what is comfortable. We seek to avoid discomfort. In yogic terms, we encounter a klesha (obstacle) on the path and rather than confront it, we retreat. There are two kleshas that are most likely operative in the case of declining commitment to our new year’s resolutions. In Sanskrit, they are raga and dvesa, attachment and aversion. We are attached to our old ways of being, to what we know and what has come to define us, and we are averse to the discipline and challenge required for change. Many of our new year’s resolutions require both physical and emotional or psychological transformation. Four weeks into the new year, we may really be feeling the impact of the commitments we’ve made.
The Six Destroyers
In addition to recognizing the kleshas, yogic teachings also lay out what are known as the “six destroyers of yoga practices.” There are multiple translations of the destroyers, but generally they can be summarized as over-eating, over-exertion, talking too much, becoming too rule-bound, choosing unwise company and wavering in our dedication. It may be most useful to think of these destroyers as ways that our attachment to pleasure and aversion to discomfort manifest themselves.
Overeating and Over-Exertion
Over-eating is actually pleasurable to many of us at the time we are engaged in it. The unhealthy foods we eat in large quantities contain sugar, sodium and fats that produce a cascade of biochemical reactions—pleasurable in the short run, but unhealthy in the long run. Over-eating is not just binge eating or consuming unhealthy foods, but also eating too frequently or beyond the point of satiety. When we are too full for too much of the day, we find it difficult and physically uncomfortable to practice yoga or other forms of physical activity, and due to the chemical effects of this eating, we may lack motivation. |
