Post #73: The Yoga of Botox

22 Oct. 2023

The very question may invite more chuckles and ridicule (or disdain) than serious reflection: can a meditator retain any kind of credibility if he resorts to Botox, or hair implants, or surgical nips and tucks, or perhaps testosterone replacement therapy and Viagra? Are these sensually tinged (or tainted) tributes to the vanities of the boudoir not the very antithesis of what a mature appreciation of the Dhamma is supposed to be about?

I suspect that there are, on the circuit, quite a few committed meditators, yoga instructors, and sundry all-purpose gurus who take refuge not only in the Triple Gem but also, more discreetly, in such worldly contrivances—or who begin to waver in their opposition as the signs of decay set in too noticeably. Not nearly as many, I am sure, would be keen on volunteering details, and for my own part, too, I am not at all eager to spell out exactly where I stand or draw the line in this embarrassing domain. (I will confess to having done one and seriously considering at least one other, but that’s as much as I am willing to divulge.)

The purist position looks painfully clear: the Dhamma requires acceptance of impermanence and aging, and any clinging to the vestiges of youth must look correspondingly immature, desperate, and unsound. Householders are in a somewhat different position than monks in this respect, however, and the question of sexual attractiveness cannot be dismissed out of hand. Sermonize all you want from the austere heights of the supramundane Path; I shall not dispute your position. I will merely point out, with a bit of emphasis, that for the rest of us, down below in the fertile valley with its meadows and hedges, our quality of life happens to have a sexual dimension, and then some. I am not saying that it is everything, only that it is something more than an afterthought or a stain on our existences as benighted wordlings.

Must we go gently into the night, or may we fight, fight against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas put it? He wrote rage, rage, of course, and therein may lie the difference: raging cannot recommend itself to the meditator under any circumstances; but is the same true of fighting for the remaining sparks of vitality, including what can be preserved of the sexual embers, or must one be ready, or even eager, to resign them at the first call, as trifles and distractions from what really matters? Are they vanities only, rooted in delusion, or does our creaturely existence, on its own terms, have a legitimate claim on us even in view of the Dhamma—said to reflect, after all, how things are, not how we would like them to be, whether our likings look up or down.

What kind of “yoga” does the Dhamma really aim at? Are we meant to get as far away as we can from the ever-putrid things of the body, renouncing sensual pleasures as a matter of course, and “coming out of” our desires and passions, as the Vipassana refrain goes? Or is it not rather about giving our physical urges and desires their natural due, with self-awareness and an eye on taming their excesses, but above all, from the vantage point of a certain inner remove? In the traditional interpretation, yoga (derived from the Sanskrit yuj, to join, integrate, or harness, as in the English yoke) refers to the strictly spiritual communion of one’s higher, purer, truer self or soul with the eternal divine. I wonder, though, whether it could not also be understood, as in fact it is taken in yoga studios around the world, along the lines of what we mean when we speak of holding body and mind together—thus a call to heed how we are embodied creatures who must, wherever we go, bring our physical beings along for the journey, whether we are traveling by the high road or the low, or by the middle way.

In Plato (no apologist for sensual self-indulgence he), the hydra’s heads, when chopped off, only grow back more fiercely; it is not a question of subduing the beast by force, but of taming it with a firm but gentle and friendly hand (Republic IX, 589). In the Sutta Nipata, as I’ve mentioned several times before, it is likewise emphasized that our old habits must fall off in their natural course, like the worn-out skin of a molting snake, and that they are not be torn off before one is ready. Plenty of screws in the world are a little too lose, granted; but lids can be screwed on too tightly as well, and the middle way is not so much a formula as a reminder to keep an attentive eye on this inner balance (or imbalance), without prejudice to one or the other side of the equation. While we are at it, we may pause for a moment to ask ourselves whether the Dhamma is really so concerned with what we do in life (including the bedroom) and not rather with how we do it, that is to say with what attitude, in a spirit of loving-kindness or not? No activity, on the face of it, could be further from the Dhamma than war; but soldiers too can walk the Path.

Returning to our worldly contrivances, an intuitive dividing line may suggest itself between measures that aim at health and those concerned with “mere looks.” It sounds and feels plausible enough, but the common disdain for the latter—generally more preached that lived by where pursuit is not either altogether hopeless on account of dearth or unnecessary on account of abundance—overlooks how closely connected the two must look from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. It also passes over some practical difficulties with drawing such a line: are testosterone shots and blue pills undue prolongations of our libidinal functions beyond their natural expiry dates, or are they restorations of sexual health?

Even the most apparently unphilosophical, counter-intuitive, and all-round irredeemable intervention—the injection of a potent nerve-poison into the center of your face to get rid of unwanted lines—may allow of a pragmatic defense, or at least a mitigation. If tensions gather and multiply around furrowed brows, and if we take seriously William James’s argument that one of the best ways to acquire a mind-frame (of calmness in this case) is to act as if you already had it, then perhaps seeing someone less grim-faced looking back at you from the mirror can help not a little with lightening and brightening your days. And if others see a friendlier-seeming you, probably without even being able to pinpoint where the impression is coming from (as these things commonly go), might they not be induced to act more cheerfully towards you, making it easier for you to reciprocate, et cetera?

But all this, you may protest with indignation, should never be a matter of looks! Should be, should be. However much we may wish to interact with others only in the purest spiritual ways, that is not how the world works; we are creatures of evolution, and appearances matter. Here as elsewhere, we are too ready to believe that we have changed or even abolished the ground rules by ignoring or scoffing at them, or by making their open avowal unacceptable. Yet the dominion of nature persists unabated in the face of all our pretenses and denials, and to disparage the outward marks of biological difference as irrelevant superficialities may be the most superficial attitude of all. Nor is it the naturally well-endowed who will be the losers by the dismissal of artifice as base and contemptible.

Whatever the philosophical balance may be, as a practical matter the scoffer at physical appearances proceeds in the manner of a dietary theoretician who considers only the nutritional value of various foods, without any regard for how much anyone actually likes to eat them. One can preach broccoli and spinach to the world all one wants; we still live in a world of pizza and burgers after the sermon, and much depends on whether one can find ways to make the broccoli more palatable by putting it on the pizza, let’s say, and maybe even inserting a few spinach leaves into a burger rather than a second or third slice of processed “cheese.”

In economics such exercises around “nudging” have spawned a whole behavioral branch of the industry; but such pragmatic negotiations with how we really are, rather than how we might hope to be in our most pious moments, are nothing very new or unusual. They are central not only to pastoral counsels and self-help literature, but also to the Aphorisms of the starkest of all philosophers, Schopenhauer, who won the public recognition that had eluded him all his life only when he embarked on an exercise in accommodation that was, strictly speaking, quite inimical to the thrust of his ur-pessimistic philosophy.

I trust it will be obvious to the reader, after the distance we’ve covered together already, that I am not trying to establish Botox at the pinnacle of yogic or meditative accomplishment. My point is not to praise or condemn anyone’s practice, let alone to tell anyone how to live. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, because I’m not sure enough myself. But what I do know is that it is a complicated business, this juggling act* of living by the Dhamma in the world as we know it. Much as I respect the canonical traditions of the Pali scriptures, our lives today are both very similar to and very different from what they were in the Buddha’s time, and we must all come to our own understanding about what that dual dynamic means for how we apply the Teaching in practice. I am not much of a renunciate and not at all drawn to the monastic life; that imposes certain limitations on my practice, no doubt, but it also opens us corresponding possibilities.

*One more debt to Stephen Batchelor (Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, p. 155, see also Post #71), though I cannot imagine him as a yogi of Botox: “The practice of the middle path is a juggling act. There is no guarantee that having found it, one will not lose it again. As a way of life, it is an ongoing task of responsiveness and risk; its twists and turns are as turbulent and unpredictable as life itself.”