I love chocolate but can't stand country music. Love rooms painted in shades of yellow but dislike mushrooms. Preferences are common. Have you ever stopped to consider how much of your behaviour is driven by preferences?
We have an experience, like going camping, that we either like or not. If we find something that is pleasurable, we work hard to repeat that experience. We might even become a little obsessed about recreating that experience. Maybe we have to always go to the same restaurant or stick to the same kind of car.
Conversely we work hard to avoid what we don't like. This is called aversion. A great deal of human suffering occurs when we try to steer away from unpleasantness, much of it inevitable. We might even drift into unhealthy behaviour like avoiding the dentist or proper exercise due to an unfortunate experience.
Yogic wisdom teaches us that aversion and attachment to pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Both pursuits/avoidances lead to suffering.
Take camping for example. I do love it. Look forward to those hot lazy lakeside days. It is almost an obsession and leads to being depressed about winter every year. I am divorced from my preferred activities and climate. Definitely this is suffering.
Yoga practice helps me to experience the beauty and perhaps discomfort in each breath. I practice letting go of attachment to perfection and pleasure, and open to breathing through what doesn't please me in that moment. There is equanmity in this space.
So if you have read the previous post, about the beautiful meditative morning torpedoed by the radio music, you might recognize how attachment to practising meditation in a certain environment would preclude enjoying the practice that morning. Aversion to mind numbing, outdated music also might have dampened the moment. To truly practice yoga, however, I tried really hard to detach and sit with the imperfection. Meditation might not have been easy, but it felt like I really practised yoga.
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