What’s the most challenging thing you can imagine doing in your yoga practice? The splits? A handstand? While these advanced yoga poses take years of dedication and patience to accomplish, aparigraha may be the most difficult aspect of yoga to master.
What is Aparigraha?
Aparigraha is the second of the yamas (internal disciplines), as described by Patanjali in his ‘Yoga Sutras’. The guiding principle of this yoga practice is not to act on the impulse to be greedy. Immediately, this raises a massive red flag for contemporary western society, which is almost entirely, at a social and economic level, based upon the ideal of limitless wealth and ownership.
In many ways our capitalist consumer culture demands that the line between what we ‘want’ and what we ‘need’ be blurred. Aparigraha is in this respect the most necessary and difficult yoga practice we can commit to because it asks us not only to define the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’ but also to relinquish the former.
Because it is so hard to start practising the yamas immediately in the realm of our everyday lives, the best starting point for this practice is on your yoga mat during your asana practice. This is why it is called a yoga ‘practice’, because you are practicing for that moment when you step off the mat and back into the outside world, when your yoga truly begins.
Explore Your Attachments
Once you commit to aparigraha at the yoga studio or in your home practice, begin by paying attention to the ways that you are ‘attached’ in your yoga practice. Are you attached to achieving a certain level of success in your yoga poses, perhaps based on outside influences of what that should be or look like? Are you attached to the outcomes of your asana practice in terms of how it will make you look or feel?
Once you have bravely begun to answer these question in relation to the microcosm of your asana practice, you may begin to find threads linking to the macrocosm of your life; perhaps a similar approach to the success of your career, or feelings of deep attachment to a spouse, or desire for material goods or wealth. The first step both on and off your yoga mat is simply to notice. True change can come only once we see things clearly.
Release Greed and Attachment
So why should we release greed and attachment? Because being attached to owning things and people — to goals and dreams — creates discomfort and unhappiness when reality happens: when people leave us or pass on, when jobs don’t come through, or when you never get perfect abs.
It’s not about being numb and detached; instead, it’s about loving people and seeing our needs clearly in a healthy way that recognizes the transient nature of reality. The yoga of non-attachment does not mean that we should give up our goals (in practice or in life), it invites us to simplify our goals by getting rid of ‘wants’.
This yoga practice is about cultivating satisfaction and fulfillment from within through simplifying. Aparigraha helps keep us moving forward at a steady pace, facing success and failure evenhandedly, helping us find emotional balance.