Inspired Lunacy

“Moon day,” much to the chagrin of 11 year-old boys the world over, does not refer to the afternoon you all decide to bare your asses from the schoolbus window at passing cars; rather, it denotes, in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition, the two mornings a month—the day when the moon is new and when it is full—that earnest yogis and yoginis historically refrain from practice and instead, sleep in, linger over morning coffee, or otherwise fill up the two or so hours they’d normally be bending and sweating through on the mat.

On the website of renowned Ashtanga teacher, Tim Miller, there is an explanation of why new and full moon days are observed as holidays, and who am I to argue with that?

Still, I think the reasoning is on firmer ground in its explanation of prana and apana; the business about our bodies being 70% water and therefore subject to the lunar cycles has an air of the pseudo-scientific about it; you’ve got to be a pretty huge body of water before the gravitational attraction of the moon is going to have any affect on you; so unless you’re the Liz Taylor of Joan Rivers’ circa 1980 fat jokes, “Can we tawlk?” I don’t think that claim will hold much water, no pun intented.

For me, perhaps the most important aspect of the lunar holidays (apart from lingering over coffee, of course) is the reminder that there are forces related to the yoga practice that are more powerful than me and that therefore, when it comes to this near-daily ritual, I don’t have to be—that is, I can’t be—perfect.

And that’s related to a spirit of moderation that apparently is found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. In his commentary to the first sutra of the second chapter, “Yoga and Its Practice,” Swami Prabhavananda quotes from the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna condemns fanatics who engage in a “perverse cult of self-torture”: “You may know those men to be of demonic nature who mortify the body excessively in ways not prescribed by the scriptures. They do this because their lust and attachment to sense objects has filled them with egotism and vanity. In their foolishness, they weaken all their sense organs, and outrage me, the dweller within the body.”

It’s easy enough, in one’s devotion to any serious practice, whether it’s yoga, academic study, bird-watching, you name it, to forget that, and get so obsessed with the endeavor that a single misstep seems like the end of the world.

Taking a chill-pill a couple days a month reminds us that the practice is expansive as hell, has what farmer-philosophy Wendell Berry, in his classic essay "Solving for Pattern" calls “wide margins,” and will still be there for us tomorrow, even if we fuck up a little today.

Inspired lunacy, indeed.