Iyengar’s language for the same idea

B.K.S. Iyengar gives practitioners a way to hear this teaching. In his lecture “Yoga and Dharma,” which we met in the first essay of this series, he describes yoga as “the science of duty of the body, of the consciousness and of the self,” and dharma as that which “supports, sustains, upholds” those who fall. He then gives dharma a practical shape:

“Dharma also means the science of duty. Dharma is a code of conduct, a guide to live in the right direction.”
(Iyengar, Aṣṭadaḷa Yogamālā, vol. 1, p. 159)

In Light on Life, his river shows the same relationship. One bank is dharma, “the righteous duty that upholds, sustains, and supports our humanity” (p. 237). A life flows between the banks of duty and freedom, and the duties along that channel hold the water together.

A scholar-practitioner’s own-law

I know this collision from my own path. A senior yoga teacher once told me that a practitioner needs devotion alone, free of questions and doubt. I have devotion and faith in me, and still the part of me that wants to inquire, again and again, kept asking. I am a scholar, and that belongs to my nature.

At the university, I heard the opposite. A serious scholar, I was told, keeps away from practicing yoga, because practice is “inauthentic” for a researcher and would make me seem biased and less objective to other scholars. I knew that these words and opinions could never take my practice from me. I needed it as much as I needed to ask questions, to inquire, and to research.

Each community saw half of my path as a mistake. For me, the two are inseparable. I am a scholar and a practitioner at the same time, and this is my own-law.

From the battlefield to the studio

The collision Kṛṣṇa addresses appears whenever an action looks wrong from the outside while remaining the duty of the person who must perform it. A teacher who arrives at her class exhausted, grieving, or angry meets the same question. The question asks whether she can stand in the role that supports the people who came to learn, and it leaves aside whether she feels like teaching. Kṛṣṇa states the principle in chapter 3:

“Better is one’s own law, though imperfectly performed, than the law of another well performed. Better is death in one’s own law; the law of another is fraught with fear.”
(Bhagavad Gītā 3.35)

The verse asks for faithfulness to one’s own path, even when one walks it imperfectly. The Sanskrit word for “imperfect” here is viguṇa, lacking in quality.

Being Good enough

My own-law has more than two strands. I am a scholar-practitioner, and I am also a mother-yogini. I will keep yoga alongside motherhood and my research, and I will keep motherhood alongside both. Some scholars and yoginis have chosen a path without motherhood; mine holds all three. So I follow my svadharma in a “good enough” way, in the words of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. The good-enough mother, for Winnicott, meets her child’s needs with real care and imperfect means, and that imperfection itself helps the child grow. Kṛṣṇa’s viguṇa, own-law imperfectly performed, says something similar. A life that holds several callings at once will meet each of them imperfectly, and each still remains one’s own.