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As I prepare to teach a workshop on mindful eating, I have been thinking a lot about aparigraha, the yama (ethical practice) translated variously as “freedom from hoarding, absence of greed and of possessions beyond one’s needs” or “non-covetousness.”

As Mr. Iyengar points out in “The Tree of Yoga”, yama is considered to be the roots of the tree, the foundation from which everything else in our practice, and therefore our lives, grows. The main thesis of this book is that yoga practices are holomorphic; that is, any one practice is inextricably linked to every other. So it’s difficult to address one aspect of practice without seeing how it impacts or is affected by the others.

No doubt we’ve all become exquisitely aware of how contemporary North American culture is so heavily saturated with excess, with always wanting more, to the point where our nation’s economic well-being has been threatened to the core. Greed is not just part of our national character; it’s embedded in human nature, which is why spiritual paths from yoga to Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian traditions specify curbing our enthusiasm, so to speak, for things we think we must have but don’t as key to spiritual health and wholeness.

My desire to help others with neurotic relationships with food began with my own food addiction as a young woman.

During the latter part of my high school career, I took up cigarettes, in cahoots with Jane, a close friend whose parents’ smoked. That was my first conscious taste of addiction. The cigarettes represented freedom from my parents’ strictness—a sort of distorted form of liberation for me. Jane’s parents, of course, were more permissive, so we’d spend time in her basement experimenting with oil paints and smoking cigarettes, fancying ourselves budding artists. We may not have been popular at school, but we aspired to come across as very hip and cool.

In college, I continued to smoke but added overeating to my repertoire. It started with going back for seconds on desserts. It escalated as my friends and I would sneak into the dorm cafeteria at night and steal ice cream out of the loosely locked freezer. I’d binge on a large package of M&M’s as I puffed on one cigarette after another and swigged diet soda during “all-nighters” to finish my homework on time.

Over the years my overeating led to a pattern of weight cycling. The scale would go up and down 10, 20, 30 or more pounds each year. Each year I’d try some other diet, some kind of exercise plan.

Overeating was much harder to give up than smoking, which took me five efforts spaced over more than 5 years to finally quit.

Mr. Iyengar gives the example of how aparigraha shows up in asana practice as wanting to exceed our bodily limitations. Who doesn’t struggle with wanting to express the ideal form of a pose—to look like the teacher or the flexible 20-year-old yogini on the mat in front of us—despite the frustrations of physical limitation, muscle tightness and so on?

So in Bharadvajrasana (a sitting twist), I stretch long on the left side of the body, only to crimp the right side. Mr. Iyengar says:

“When you are giving total attention to performing equally on the right and left, there is no attachment or avarice, for when the soul is moving with the intelligence in the body, there is nothing to possess, nothing to seek. There is also freedom from greed, because motivation disappears; when motivation disappears, so does possession, and with non-possession, acquisitiveness also comes to an end.” (“The Tree of Yoga”, p. 51)

Paradoxically, my addictive “need” for more, more, more started with a desire for freedom. Yet addiction and the constant desire to have more, or to be more, are anything but liberating.

Many psychologists would explain this as originating from our history as helpless infants who had to demand feeding, warmth and the basics of existence to survive to childhood. Our ego/personality, the part of ourselves we tend to identify with, seeks power and control in the largely unconscious belief that we need to be the best—or at least better than most—in order to survive. We establish a pattern of largely unconscious thoughts and behaviors that carry through adulthood until we become self-destructive enough to want to change.

From a psychospiritual perspective, we might say that the ego sees itself as a separate self, in competition with other selves to survive and thrive in life.

The Eastern spiritual traditions have much to offer those of us with this predominantly Western mindset. They teach us that we are all part of a much larger picture; that all of life is interconnected. The tradition that Patanjali codified in the Eight Limbs offers us a systematic way to integrate the desires of the small self more harmoniously into the Wholeness that is Life/Death/Oneness.

While some interpretations of yoga urge renunciation—to just give up your desires—as the way to liberation, I prefer a more forgiving, Tantric approach.

I believe that cultivating mindfulness, staying present in the body moment to moment as much as possible, allows us to fully experience our bodily sensations, allowing us to feel satisfaction in each moment. It is when we live in the rear-view mirror, expecting out of habit that whatever we’re doing (or eating) now will not be enough, that we go numb to what is. Or when we become anxious about the future, always looking ahead to what’s next in an effort to protect ourselves from harm, that we overlook the pleasure and the safety of the present moment.

The Buddhist/yogic cultivation of mindfulness, then, is the practice that carries me through the ups and downs of each day and helps me find contentment (santosa) and truth (satya) here and now. Only then can the endless waves of desire for more subside.

Jan Bresnick, RYT 500, teaches yoga at various studios, health clubs and corporations in Morris County, including the Atlantic Health System. She also has a local and long-distance healing practice based in Morristown, NJ. Contact Jan

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