Is pleasure a distraction—or a doorway to healing?
When ancient yogic wisdom meets modern embodiment, things can get… nuanced. 🤯
One of my students recently asked how Patanjali’s Sutra 1.15—which centers on non-attachment—fits with Somatic Yoga’s embrace of pleasure as part of the healing process. In this episode, I unpack that question with heart, humor, and some soul-stretching insight.
You’ll learn:
🔹 What vairagya (non-attachment) really means in context
🔹 Why pleasure isn’t the opposite of spirituality—it can be a portal
🔹 How to honor classical teachings without abandoning your body’s wisdom
If you’ve ever felt torn between discipline and delight… this one’s for you.
🎁 Get my FREE $67 Somatic Self Healing Workshop => https://www.brettlarkin.com/ffy
📖 Different translations mentioned:
Edwin F Bryant: https://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Sutras-Pata%C3%B1jali-Translation-Commentary/dp/0865477361
Sri Swami Satchidananda: https://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Sutras-Patanjali-Swami-Satchidananda/dp/1938477073
Alan Finger: https://www.amazon.com/Tantra-Yoga-Sutras-Essential-Awareness/dp/1611806151
BKS Iyengar: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Yoga-Sutras-Patanjali-Iyengar/dp/1855382253
FREE Practice: Divine Feminine Yoga for Beginners | TANTRA AND SACRED SEXUALITY
Relevant Blog: Understanding Divine Feminine Energy In Your Life
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
🐍 History of Yoga
✅ 200-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
🎧 Also Listen to:
#271 – What is Kriya Yoga? How Does it Work?
#297 – What is Samkhya Philosophy and How is it Different from Yoga?
#352 – Redefining Feminine Energy in Yoga & Ayurveda with Katie Silcox
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
Brett:
It’s time for you to walk through the world with the confidence and serenity of someone who’s deeply tethered to their inner wisdom. If you have this insatiable hunger to uplift your personal life and make a bigger impact in your wellness career, leveraging yoga’s ancient wisdom, welcome. I’ve certified thousands of yoga instructors online, I teach to over half a million subscribers on YouTube, but I still haven’t remotely quenched my thirst for more yogic knowledge.
I’m Brett Larkin, founder of Uplifted Yoga, and this is the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where yoga enthusiasts and teachers transform their lives for the better. Let’s get started. What happens when ancient yogic wisdom meets modern embodiment principles? One of my incredible students recently asked how Sutra 1.15 in the Yoga Sutras, which is the sutra that focuses on non-attachment, aligns with some of somatic yoga’s emphasis on pleasure and healing.
And I figured, why don’t we just unpack all this juiciness with humor and heart in today’s episode. So we’re going to explore whether pleasure is a distraction or a doorway to healing. We’re going to look at what Patanjali really meant by non-attachment by going into the Sanskrit etymology.
We’re going to look at how to reconcile classical yogic teachings with modern self-care. So if you’ve ever wondered whether embracing joy or feeling pleasure and happiness is spiritual or spiritual enough, this podcast is for you. And if you’re interested in incorporating somatic yoga into your healing, which has been so profound and so incredible for me, I want you to know that my somatic yoga course doors are open, meaning you can get this trauma-informed home study course, which is a certificate in somatic yoga.
This is self-paced, so you can work through the videos from the comfort of your own home and the practices. I will ship you a beautiful paper manual. The last time I opened doors to this course, the paper manual sold out within three days.
So absolutely go check this out. See if this is something you might want to join. The link is in the show notes.
And without further ado, let’s jump in to this week’s episode. Hello, my friends. Pleasure often gets a bad reputation in our society.
It becomes a sexualized term. And in my Yoga for Self Mastery course, we talk a lot about reclaiming pleasure, reclaiming joy, reclaiming our authenticity, reclaiming things that feel good to us, that we’ve forgotten and doing like radical self-care. And in my somatic programs, in the somatic coaching, I have one of our core pillars of how we approach somatics as a body of work is pleasure first, right? Pleasure is such a generative energy, and it’s an essential part.
Reclaiming pleasure is an essential part of the healing process. So if you’re someone who’s been through trauma, reintegrating and reincorporating your ability to take in the good, to feel pleasurable things is so incredibly important. However, a lot of this teaching directly conflicts with what we see in the Yoga Sutras.
And this was brought to my attention by an incredible student. So I, first of all, want to give just a huge shout out to all of you enrolled on the uplifted campus right now, because you don’t just learn from me. You learn from each other and the level of insight and deep questions and just incredible backgrounds that y’all have on our campus.
It’s so impressive. And so I’m so grateful to this student who inspired this podcast. And what she wrote in was that she was reading inside the Yoga Sutras, which is one of the many texts we look at in 200 hour teacher training, which is one of the foundational programs.
And she said, you know, I’m wondering how to find this, the balance of this idea of pleasure first, because she’s in the somatic coaching program now. She said, you know, in Sutra 1.15, it clearly says that non-attachment is the manifestation of self-mastery and one who is free from craving objects either seen or heard about. We’re going to really dive into this Sutra 1.15 today.
But she went on to say that, you know, she felt conflicted. She feels conflicted because when she’s opening up to pleasure, it can feel like a slippery slope to attachment and a belief that happiness is on the outside of her. She caveated this with saying, you know, I also recognize that I have a pattern of denying myself pleasure and not opening myself up to everything I might desire.
So maybe these things aren’t incompatible, but she kind of wanted to have a dialogue about this. And I was like, you know what, let’s just bring the whole podcast into this dialogue. It’s just so incredibly interesting.
Let’s back up. And as a first step, really think about who the Yoga Sutras were written for. And those of you who’ve read my book, Yoga Life, you know, I have a whole chapter about this.
But the Yoga Sutras were a text that was written for those who were pursuing a monastic life or a reclusive lifestyle. So for young boys entering the priest, the equivalent of priesthood at that time, they were going to go live in an ashram and that was going, you know, they weren’t going to get married. That was going to be their life, you know, entering at age 12 or 13.
It was written for those running those ashrams, right? So the teachers, those living a completely reclusive lifestyle. And then it was written for men who were in their last stage of life, which is where they would, after they’d been a grandfather and kind of raised their grandchildren and given back to their community, they’d start thinking about the next life because they believed in reincarnation. And so at a certain point, a grandfather would, you know, leave his town.
He was no longer needed there by his family or his community. He’d already given back and he would take on the role of what’s called a sannyasa, which means he would basically take off all his clothes, give away all his possessions and go and beg and beg for alms, wander in the woods, go and meditate in caves and start practicing some of these ascetic practices to disassociate from his physical body in order to prepare for the next life. Right.
So really getting ready for his his spirit to exit his physical form. So it’s these two groups of people that the Yoga Sutras were written for, those who were living a reclusive lifestyle and those who were very elderly and preparing for the next life. And it was written for men.
But in both cases, these were men. Flash forward, it’s become the most popularized text in the West on yoga. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for that that I’ve talked about in other podcasts.
I think it’s it’s a very user friendly yoga manual for people in the West. Right. There’s not a ton of mention of Hindu gods and deities, unlike the Bhagavad Gita, where it’s like there’s there’s all sorts of like Hindu mythology all over the place.
It’s straightforward. It’s direct. You know, it’s so it’s very palatable, I think, to our Western culture.
And in some ways, to me, it feels a little bit sad because there are so many other incredible texts that yoga students end up never looking at or never getting curious about. And that’s why I’m so glad we’re doing so many episodes here on the podcast. We’re really going to look at the Bhagavad Gita because the Gita was the book that was written for the householder, for the everyday person.
Now, I’m not going to say that there’s no value in the Yoga Sutras and we’re going to really dive into Sutra 1.15 today. But I think talking about the context of who this book was actually written for is so incredibly important. And it’s an often overlooked step.
I mean, no one ever talked to me about this ever when I was going through my original journey and first falling in love with yoga. Now, let’s look at where this sutra actually appears. I’m sure you’re all aware the Yoga Sutras has four books, book one, book two, book three and book four.
That’s how the sutras are divided up. And the first book or kind of like big chapter is called Samadhi Pada, right? So it’s the teachings on Samadhi. I’m sure you know if you’re listening to this podcast, what’s Samadhi? It’s bliss.
It’s enlightenment. So Patanjali, like any good methodical teacher, you know, he tells us where we’re going. He begins with the destination, right? He’s like, this is what Samadhi is.
This is where we’re going. This is what I’m going to teach you how to do in chapter two. So he’s really showing us the destination.
So the sutras that are in this section are very much related to Samadhi. We’ll tie back into how this is highly relevant in a moment. First, let’s get on the same page together and read some of these sutras together.
I want to focus our time together on Sutra 1.15. But as you know, if you’ve listened to my podcast that, you know, talk about each book of the Yoga Sutras, the sutras kind of come together in little chunks or like grape clusters, right? So I decided that actually just looking at 1.15 in isolation might be challenging. So I actually want to look at 1.12 to 1.16. So, you know, a little quartuplet quintuplet. How many sutras is that? I can’t do math, but it’s like four or five.
Sutra 1.12 kicks off this section and we’ll work with Satyajnananda’s commentary and translation to start. And then, of course, you know me, we’re going to compare it to a lot of other translators because one translation is never enough for the full picture. So Swami Satyajnananda, and this this sutra is really important, I think, to know the Sanskrit of.
It’s the sutra where we see the words abhyasa, which means practice, and varagya, dispassion or non-attachment. So Satyajnananda says the mind is controlled by practice and non-attachment. BKS Iyengar’s version of that is practice and detachment are the means to still the movement of consciousness.
Edwin Bryant says the fluctuations of the mind are stilled by practice and renunciation. My teacher Alan Finger’s translation, a little longer, but it’s actually my favorite that I’ve seen so far. When we make the effort to focus the mind on one action, object or image without getting caught up in the desire for the result of that effort, then the vritti are still and the mind can come into balance.
So he’s not doing so much of the literal translation, but he’s describing, I think, what the overall aim or idea here is. And what’s so funny is like as I read all these aloud, it’s like the Bhagavad Gita is basically about Sutra 1.12. Like right here, we just have a couple words, like how do we take action but not be attached to the fruits of our labor? And that is so much central to the Gita. And, you know, we have pages and pages and pages of Q&A discourse on just this one idea.
But again, the Sutras is pretty brief. It then goes on Sutra 1.13. Practice is the effort to secure steadiness as such a tananda. Iyengar says practice is the steadfast effort to still these fluctuations.
And Bryant says practice is the effort to be fixed in concentrating the mind. Alan Singer says the first part of this recipe for balancing and stilling the mind is abhyasa. Abhyasa means making your best effort to focus all the vritti, we know what vritti are, right? The mind chatter, the mental fluctuations on a single point, whether it is an action, object, thought or image.
So we’re describing a meditative formula, right? Remember, we’re in the Samadhi chapter of a book that’s basically a book on disembodiment. You’re going to see more about that in a moment, but we really can’t. If you wanted to make the argument, and sorry, Yoga Sutras, I love you, but if you wanted to make the argument that the Yoga Sutras are literally a textbook on how to disassociate from your physical body, I think you would have a very good case because that’s very much what this is.
And because we’re in the Samadhi chapter where he’s describing what Samadhi is, what he’s describing here is an incredibly complex meditative practice. He’s not saying to do this while we’re taking care of our kids or driving our car or anything like that. That’s actually going to be in the practice chapter, which is the next chapter, the Sadhana Pada, which opens with, drumroll, my favorite sutra of all time, Sutra 2.1, Kriya Yoga is made up of Tapas, Svadhyaya, and it’s very pranidhana.
So that leads right back to the Yoga of Self-Mastery course, which is an entire course just on that one sutra, because that’s the sutra about how to live the yoga. Here, we’re very much still in the context of if you want to quiet the mental chatter in your mind, you need to be aware of this thing called abhyasa, which means you need to effort to still and quiet your mind. But BTW, you also need to balance that with a relaxed demeanor, the ability to let go of any desire to have perfect concentration, let’s say.
So let’s keep going. Patanjali, he’s so methodical, you really got to give it to him. In Sutra 1.12, he presents abhyasa and vairagya, practice and attachment, are the means to stilling the vritti or the movements of consciousness in the mind.
Got to know about those two things. Then the next sutra, he defines what each of those things are. So Sutra 1.13 is the abhyasa sutra.
That would be our consistent practice. We’ve got to effort, we’ve got to practice. And then Sutra 1.15 is the vairagya piece, the second part of the recipe.
Alan Finger writes, vairagya is the ability to let go of any desire for the fruits of our efforts to focus the mind. Because if you’re just like, focus, focus, focus, and then you get tense and rigid, right? And then he writes, this allows our consciousness to take action in the world without attachment. So it’s like we want to try, but we can’t force it.
And once we start forcing it, we start clenching and getting attached. And I mean, I wish you could see my body because like my fingers are like little claws as I talk about, right? And I’m starting to feel more tension in my body. So we’ve got to balance these things.
And then I skipped Sutra 1.14, which is nestled in between those two, where this is sort of, I feel like it’s a footnote, right? He mentions that abhyasa, it’s more about abhyasa. He says, abhyasa practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a long time without break and in all earnestness. Which basically means like you got to practice a lot, like consistently with enthusiasm.
You know, Iyengar translates the same 1.14, long interrupted alert practice is the firm foundation for restraining the fluctuations. And Brian says that practice when continued for a long time without interruption and with devotion becomes firmly grounded. These translations are so different from one another.
It’s so fascinating. So we have these two concepts, so important practice and non-attachment. And what I love about these two concepts is like, there is so much gold here.
It’s like, how can I come to my yoga mat and meditate every day without the expectation of seeing a white light or achieving bliss or nirvana or feeling really good, like I happened to the other time, you know, a couple of weeks ago. I always say the hardest time to meditate or do your practice is after you have like a really incredible energetic experience or you see something, you feel something big because then you come back to your meditation cushion and you weren’t, you know, previously you weren’t expecting anything cool to happen and something cool did happen. And now moving forward, you’re like, oh, is that going to happen again? I really want that to happen again.
And I’ve had this with Kundalini meditations like years ago where I’d have, you know, a really beautiful experience with something, usually not expecting it or, you know, sometimes even with a meditation I didn’t like, but I was just trying really, really hard. And then I would go back and try to do that same Kriya or that same practice. But it was almost like tainted for me because I had this attachment to hopefully feeling that way again.
Right. So it became a little bit counterproductive. So then we get to Sutra 1.15, which was the one my student originally asked about the consciousness of self mastery in one who is free from craving for objects seen or heard about is non-attachment.
Okay, so he, at least Satchitananda is using this Sutra to really define what Vyagra is. He’s saying it’s a self mastery that’s achieved by being free from desires, both seen and heard. Let’s look at Bryant.
He says, dispassion. So he’s translating this dispassion. Dispassion is the controlled consciousness of one who has no thirst for sense objects, whether actually perceived or described.
So he’s saying that this dispassion, this Vyagra is achieved when we don’t want any sense objects, like directly or even to think about them. Like I don’t want water and I don’t want to imagine or think about water, neither. This, my friends, is like the opposite of somatic embodiment work.
The polar opposite. I’m actually, I’m really grateful for Edward Bryant right now. And this particular translation where he’s talking about has no thirst for sense objects because the language of the body, your animal body is the senses, the five senses.
And it’s something we coach on and work on so heavily in training. It’s like trying to activate the five senses, trying to have a five senses experience of something. That is like the absolute opposite of what this teaching is, right? It’s like be completely detached from sense objects, which again, in the context of someone who’s, you know, reading a meditation manual or reading a text in order to connect with God, connect with higher consciousness, leave their identity, their ego, leave their body or prepare for the next life, like makes perfect sense.
But that’s why I think it’s so important we really look at the context of where these teachings are coming from and who they were for. Let’s just cap off this section, Sutra 1.16, which is sort of the closing to this bundle. Satchitananda says, where there is non-thirst for even the gunas, and I’m sure most of you listening know what the gunas are, but if you don’t, they’re like the three elements of nature, tamas, rajas, and sattva.
So when there is not thirst for even the gunas due to realization of purusha, the true self, that is supreme non-attachment. I’m really grateful for this translation, too, because I’ve had really incredible teachers talk to me about the gunas, which could be its own podcast episode. Maybe it is a podcast episode.
If it is, I’ll put it in the show notes. But if the gunas, the gunas being in fluctuation, is what indicates that something is alive. So if the gunas are all level and still, something is dead, which makes perfect sense because here we’re kind of talking about leaving this plane of consciousness, leaving our physical body, leaving our ego, leaving our identity, and having this transcendent supernatural merge with the universe, merge with this bliss consciousness.
That’s what samadhi is in the sutras. We’re doing that, and so wouldn’t have thirst for even the gunas would kind of almost, it’s like a mini death, right? So much of these meditative practices are actually preparing you for like mini death, and that’s what they were used for. Remember we talked about the elderly men getting used to, like, I am more than my physical body.
That is such a great thing, honestly. It is such a great thing to know that you are more than your physical body. It is such a great thing to have this sense of deep interconnectedness with everything and everyone.
It is so beautiful to, if you’re feeling dysregulated or you need more faith, like to be able to put yourself in that kind of state. But can you also see how there’s like a very dark side to especially, I think, many yoga practitioners pursuing this and just learning how to disassociate or spiritually bypass all their feelings or a lot of difficult stuff that they actually need to process in their physical body. So I’m not saying any of this is bad, but I don’t think it’s something that you can focus on exclusively unless you’re living in an ashram, in which case that’s great and love to come visit you there.
I would love to be in an ashram for a week or two. That would be wonderful. So the Iyengar’s translation of 1.16, when the ultimate level of non-attachment is attained, and vairagya has different, there’s like, I think, four different components to it.
So again, that’s its own probably episode, but here it’s, they’re talking about paravayagra. But when the aspirant is free from the qualities of nature, and the seer dwells in his own nature, meaning like you merge with universal consciousness. And then let’s look at Bryant.
He says the highest form of dispassion is non-thirst for even the gunas, which would basically mean the senses, you could definitely translate it that way, due to the realization of the purusha, the true self. Okay, so what are the commonalities between all these translations that we’ve looked at? Pretty much all translators agree that we need both practice, abhyasa, and non-attachment, vairagya, to still our mental fluctuations. When we’re trying to meditate, when we are trying to achieve that bliss, that state of interconnectedness and otherworldly consciousness, we need both practice and non-attachment.
Practice, what’s that defined? Sutra 1.13 is a steadfast effort to try to maintain mental focus. And Sutra 1.14, in order to do that, we need time, we need to be uninterrupted, we need to do it with earnestness and enthusiasm. Sutra 1.15, non-attachment involves achieving self-mastery by being free from cravings for sensory objects, whether directly experienced or just heard about.
So it is the opposite of being in your body, pretty much, because the body has a lot of body wants to move, the body has trauma bound in it that it wants to unwind and heal from in a self-guided, intuitive manner or under the safety of a myofascial therapist, in my opinion. Okay, Sutra 1.16, the highest form of non-attachment is attained when there is no desire for even the fundamental qualities of nature, meaning the gunas, due to the realization of the true self. Which makes sense, like if I merged with God or merged with higher consciousness, like no, I’m not thinking about how I want pizza or what feels icky or yucky in my body, like I’m on a totally different plane.
So yeah, I have no desires for the fundamental qualities of nature or the gunas. So Sutra 1.15 is, and these two concepts, this whole section, is about the two key practices, abhyasa and vairagra, to achieve inner stillness. These are the two practices we need to achieve inner stillness, stop the mental fluctuations, we need to practice focusing our mind.
And great examples of how you might do that is by meditating, you know, chanting, gazing at a candle flame or a picture, breathing, you know, all of these tools that we’re given in meditation, pranayama, visualization, yantra, breath work, mudras, mantra, like all of these could fall under this category of practice of focusing the mind. But we also need to remain detached from the fruits of our labor. We need to not be overthinking it so hard that we become grasping and clingy.
And then there’s a lot of people who are giving commentary about like, is this realistic for the average person? And I think my personal take, and I invite you to make your own judgments, but I think my personal take is that this book, specifically, especially this chapter, we’re not talking about the average person right now. We’re talking about a person who’s meditating. So I think what’s really interesting is I feel like early in falling in love with yoga, like I love these translations of the yoga sutras that made them like super practical and, you know, more palatable to modern culture and modern times.
And I’ve taught like that as well. And there’s definitely value there. But like at the end of the day, that’s not what this is.
If we want to talk about how to live our yoga and get practical, there’s many other texts we can look at. And if we wanted to look specifically at the sutras, let’s focus on the sadhana pada, not the samadhi pada, the practice chapter, which kicks off with Sutra 2.1, which is a sutra I’ve kind of revolved my whole life around. The Kriya Yoga Sutra, which you can also revolve your whole life around in the Yoga for Self Mastery course, and it’s super, super fun.
And one of those key principles that I teach is this idea of svadhyaya being pleasurable self-care. And before we talk about that, you know, these people who are kind of trying to like straddle the gap, I guess, by making this sutra, you know, more palatable to the average, average yogi walking around in Lululemon, they’re basically saying that Patanjali is saying we want mastery over our desires, but not suppression. And we want to, you know, kind of shift our relationship to cravings, but not reject the world.
Well, I don’t really see that. I’m sorry, let’s go back. Let’s go back to Sutra 1.16. We want to have non-thirst for even the elements of nature, like feeling hot and cold and all of those things.
I don’t see how that is not a rejection of the world or the worldly plane or the body. And then, you know, the idea, though, of, you know, letting go of attachment to our results, but not abandoning effort is a great one. I mean, that is applicable to a ton of things, right? Like that’s kind of like Manifestation 101, you know, search for the job, search for the soulmate or the boyfriend or whatever, you know, put your desire out there, send the resumes, write the dating profiles, go on the interviews, go on the dates, but don’t be clingy and graspy and attached to the outcome.
It’s not going to get you where you want to go. So I think that as a meta concept is really beautiful. The Sutra is suggesting that, you know, we can get freedom when we stop chasing pleasure and avoiding pain and learn how to stay more balanced in all experiences, whether we categorize those experiences as desirable and undesirable.
But I feel like some of this is a bit of a stretch when we look at the actual Sanskrit. This was designed for monastics and renunciates. Vyagra, in a literal sense, is withdrawal from the world, being a sannyasa.
And so again, the folks bridging the gap are like, well, for householders, you know, Patanjali is kind of telling us to do this in a gradual way, a practical gradual way. So we don’t give up our responsibilities, we don’t give up our relationships, but we really want to reduce our dependence on external things for happiness. And to be honest, I don’t see that in the Sanskrit.
I think that’s like an absolutely lovely idea. I don’t see it in the actual text, but I do like it as an idea. And I think the example I give in the 200-hour teacher training, those of you who’ve taken that with me is, you know, we talk about the ice cream, right? And if you can’t be happy unless you get the ice cream, then you have a problem.
But if you can be happy regardless of whether or not you have ice cream and still enjoy the summer day and still think it’s beautiful, either way, then you’re not attached. It’s kind of like, does the ice cream own you or do you own the ice cream? And I promise there’s more context to the ice cream story in the training. So Satchitananda would teach that, you know, this isn’t about running away from life, but living in the world without being controlled or disturbed by it.
And again, I love that idea. I just don’t see it in what Patanjali actually wrote. It feels like a bit of a stretch to me.
So he says, you know, we can enjoy things, but we shouldn’t be owned by them, aka the ice cream story. And Iyengar says, you know, it’s the ability to withdraw from worldly delights through wisdom, but not through force. So he really thinks, you know, this sutra is about self-discipline rather than extreme detachment.
That’s kind of his take. And Edward Bryant’s commentary, is he saying like, you don’t need to be an extreme ascetic, but this is really about like inner freedom. So that we’re going after a state of mind that is incredibly free.
And that even while living in the world, one can be detached from it mentally. And on the one hand, that’s true, right? It feels very, like almost Buddhist to me, like the middle way, right? It’s like, we can live in the world, but be detached from it mentally, meaning we’re not going to feel the high highs and we’re not this philosophy for someone who has trauma and actually needs to be feeling a lot of stuff, because you can kind of just be like, nope, I’m just going to take the middle way. When again, in somatics and embodiment work, it’s literally the opposite.
It’s like, let’s make your nervous system capacity as strong, as big, as robust as possible. So you can feel ecstatic and also feel extreme grief. You know, this is the tantric approach, right? And realize And realize that beneath both of those emotions is just pure energy, pure currency that you can harness and that you can use. mean, sure, you could want to live in the world but be completely detached from it. But another option would be
to have such a strong, beautiful, capable nervous system that I can feel like the extreme love I have for my children or my partner and feel the extreme grief that I have around my father’s death and my parents’ divorce and that all of these things can be alive and I can express them through my heart, through my body as a tantrika and know how to shape shift and move these energies through me so that something new, something beautiful can come forth and be born as part of my
Dharma, like what I’m doing here on earth, being in the world, being in my body, acting. I mean, I think that’s one of the key things we don’t see really talked about so much in the sutras is Dharma, you know, because we’re just talking so much about leaving your body and these meditative practices, which is so great, you know, I love a good meditation manual. Awesome.
But I think a lot of us are coming from this background or like the student who wrote in, right? Coming from this background and then, you know, stepping into whether it’s the somatic coaching program or yoga for self mastery. And there’s so much about pleasure and feeling deeply. And all of a sudden it’s like, wait, is that okay? And this leads us full circle.
back to what she originally wrote in, right? Saying, sometimes I feel conflicted when I’m opening up to pleasure as it feels like a slippery slope to attachment and a belief that happiness is on the outside. But I also recognize that I have a pattern of denying myself pleasure and not opening up to what I might desire. So I think we’ve solved a little bit or talked a little bit about that with the ice cream, right? If it’s a beautiful summer day and you’re not gonna be happy unless you get ice cream and you’ve made your happiness dependent on that.
Yes, that is a problem, right? Because now your happiness is dependent on an external thing. But, you know, if you’re neutral towards ice cream and if you happen to have it, you can enjoy it and feel fantastic. But you also have, you know, tools to make yourself feel fantastic no matter what, which is what Yoga for Self-Mastery is all about. Leveraging the things that you can control using the principles of Kriya Yoga in Sutra 2.1 to be the light, to feel fantastic, to feel amazing in your own skin.
here in this physical body, playing out the roles that you have. I mean, this is other reason I love the Gita, because it talks about how complicated Dharma is. We all have so many different roles. I’m a CEO, I’m a boss, I’m a mother, I’m a daughter, I’m a wife. You know, these all have conflicting Dharmas. So, you know, as great as a meditation manual is, and I want to meditate occasionally, maybe daily, but you know, it’s like, where’s the manual on
on managing all the conflicting dharmas and feeling great in my own skin in order to live every day with an excess of pranic reserves. If I have to summarize the Yoga for Self-Mastery course in a sentence or two, that is what it’s about in kind of yoga philosophy language. It’s about how can I have an excess of pranic reserves, prana being energy, how can I have a lot of energy so that I can take action in this world from a place of feeling fantastic
and on purpose.
I personally think that Patanjali would agree that if you’re caring for other people, meaning you’re in the householder stage of life, you’re caring for a business, elderly parents, a garden, children, maybe you’re just your coworker or your roommates, whatever. If you are here caring for other people with a lot of responsibilities, especially if you’re a mother, like fostering the next generation, caring for children, you need a lot of energy.
You need a lot of pranic reserves and pleasure is a generative energy. You need to give things that do things that give you energy because you’re outputting so much energy. It’s like, it was such an aha moment for me when I think maybe it was my friend Amanda Bucci, one of her courses, but you know, she really talked about how we plug our phones in at night. We don’t expect them to work unless we charge them. And she really drilled.
that like however much you’re outputting, that’s how much you need to then receive and charge up. It needs to be equal. Otherwise you’re going to be depleted. And when you’re depleted, you’re going to, you know, probably do bad habits and your yoga practice might not even happen, but you’re just going to be really unpleasant to be around. And you’re not going to be the light. You’re not going to be the love. And you’re not going to, you know, let people experience you and your magnetism, which means you,
you’re probably not gonna make the money you want in your business or experience the love you want with your partner and your kids.
And of course you can get overly attached to pleasure, like if you get addicted to chocolate or addicted to porn or, and obviously that’s not appropriate, but finding the things that are prana edifying, meaning they give you more prana, they give you more energy. If you’re living in the real world, not an ashram, I think is a very, very, very good thing. Especially if you are a caretaker who is expending tons of energy working and looking after other people, which I would guess.
Most of you on this podcast would raise your hand and say that you are.
So we’ve been taught something very, very seductive. Ironic use of the word seductive because the seductive thing I think we’ve been taught is that, you know, we can just do non-attachment disassociation, right? And I’m being spiritual and I’m being Yogi and I just need to transcend the problems. And, you know, maybe I have high Vata and it’s just easy for me to go up and out there. And that’s, that’s kind of my safe space. Like not being in my body.
not dealing with the trauma, not experiencing or letting myself feel the cathartic, really deep, healing, powerful feelings that would be so transformative for me and free up so much blocked energy. I’m just going to go up and out. And this beautiful student, know, she and I kept writing with each other. And she said, I think I’ve spent many years denying my sensual nature as a human being. And so non-attachment became a way to rationalize
denying myself pleasure. It’s been such a seductive narrative for me to be that to be spiritual in quotes, you need not to want anything. And we’re going to close it out because this podcast is getting long. But in order to be spiritual, you need not to want anything. You know, that is, I think, one aspect, one half of spirituality, which I would associate with the masculine or the Shiva.
aspect of consciousness. Shakti is moving and always craves more. That’s the polarity framework inside somatic coaching method that I teach. Right? So again, we don’t want all Shakti and we don’t want all Shiva. We want a love story happening within us, which is very similar to these two concepts of practice and non-attachment a little bit in a meta way, right? But
To say that being spiritual is like we don’t want anything, well that’s just like, you know, only taking the masculine aspect of Prana or Kundalini. I mean, this is why I’m so passionate about feminine form Kundalini, because there’s a way to move and engage with this energy that is actually very healing, very pleasurable, very fun, gives you a ton of energy, and also brings you more back into your body, down into your body. This is why I’m so passionate about this somatic work, because I feel like as yogis, we’ve like maxed out the ways to disassociate from our body.
especially in the West, like these teachings came over and it’s like, cool, we maxed out our knowledge and texts and trainings and, you know, philosophy and lectures and workshops about how to go up and out and disassociate. And we’ve completely forgotten the Shakti path, the feminine path of down and in and actually feeling more and craving more and wanting everything and knowing how to navigate that and use it and inspire our loved ones, ourselves, to take action in the world.
And she went on to write, so under the guise of being a good girl, in quotes, and having discipline, in quotes, I could justify sort of her avoidance of pleasure, right? I don’t have desires, I’m spiritual.
And then she says, learning that pleasure is not only allowed, but necessary has been both brilliant and confronting. says, I think it’s definitely a practice for me to feel and know the difference. And this is a great, kind of quandary to leave all of us with the difference between I desire this and it will give me energy versus I desire this because I think it will make me feel better or help me avoid pain or help me avoid my feelings.
And this ties so much into svadhyaya, right? Like what is true self-care? That’s what we spend the whole first half basically of Yoga for Self-Mastery going through, right? Is eating that ice cream and licking it on that delicious summer day, holding your husband’s hand, is that going to be a form of self-care that’s going to light you up and get you more in your magnetism? Or, you know, when you want to avoid your feelings, do you crave ice cream and you just want to fill yourself with something?
and know it’s going to give you a sugar crash later, but you just want it because you’re avoiding something else. Do you guys see the difference? But this is a very fine line. It’s hard to discern the difference, which is why Svadjaya, the art of Svadjaya as a verb, is such an incredible art and why I created a whole course around it.
If you dug this podcast, join me, join me for Yoga for Self Mastery, which is a prerequisite to the Somatic coaching program. Thank you so much to the student who will remain anonymous, but who, you know, inspired this whole episode and just had these beautiful insights and observations. I’m really in awe of all of you who, you know, join our community and take it to the deeper level with, with some of these trainings and certifications where we actually get to talk and dialogue together because it’s really enriched my life. The conversations that come, come out of it.
I’d love to hear what you thought of today’s show. The best way to do that is to leave a review. means so much to me and it gets the show in front of more yogis. And you can also send me a DM at Larkin Yoga TV, sending you so much love. Namaste.
