I'm either all-in or completely off the wagon — moderation feels impossible.

Read the exclusion list carefully, because it is symmetrical on purpose. Yoga is not for the over-eater — fine, we expected that. But in the same breath: not for the one who barely eats at all. Not for the oversleeper, and equally not for the hero who refuses to sleep. The verse bars the door against both of your gears. The binge and the crash diet are named in one line, as the same mistake made in opposite directions.

That symmetry carries a quiet correction. You have been treating your all-in phases as virtue and your collapses as the failure. The verse refuses the distinction. The classical commentary on it is practical about why: starve the body and it thinks about food all day and grows weak; the instrument you were going to practise with is the very thing your intensity is sabotaging. The body is the instrument, not the enemy — and the punishing sprint damages it from one side exactly as surely as indulgence does from the other. The crash was never a separate event. It was the invoice for the sprint.

Then comes the second verse, and it does something almost sly: it attaches the reward to the unglamorous option. Measured — the word is yukta, joined, yoked, in right measure — in food and recreation, measured in effort at work, measured in sleep and waking: for that person, practice becomes duḥkhahā, the destroyer of sorrow. Every spiritual tradition has its dramatic image of transformation. Here, the fire that actually burns sorrow down is handed to the person keeping regular hours.

Why does the promise live there? Because all-or-nothing, for all its sweat, is secretly the easier path. Intensity is a fortnight of drama; consistency is a year of Tuesdays. The heroic phase also comes with a built-in exit — burn hot enough and the crash is guaranteed, and the crash is restful, and some part of you knows that when you sign up for it. The verse's word yukta is a yoke-word: oxen yoked to a cart are not galloping and not grazing. They are pulling something heavy, at a pace that will still be a pace this afternoon, and tomorrow, and in the month after the mood has gone.

Notice also what moderation is not, in these lines. It is not doing less of everything. Both verses assume you keep eating, working, sleeping, moving — the whole of life stays in the frame. What goes is the oscillation. And the exclusion cuts both ways on effort too: the verse that bars the all-nighter also bars the abandoned project. Zero is an extreme. Off the wagon is not a rest position; it is the far ditch.

So this week, run the experiment the verse is proposing. Take the thing you keep quitting and set its dose by one test: what would I still do on my worst day? Not ninety minutes — fifteen. Not the full plan — the walk, the two paragraphs, the one clean meal. Then hold the ceiling as firmly as the floor: on the good day, when the old fire shows up promising to make up for lost time, do the fifteen and stop. The stopping is the practice. You are not training the activity; you are training the engine to hold a middle gear it has never been allowed to keep.

Give it a month before you judge the results. The all-in self will call it small the whole time. Let it grumble — it has had five years and a graveyard of programmes to prove its method. The measured self only needs thirty ordinary days to show you what the verse promised: that sorrow is not destroyed in a blaze. It is worn away, daily, by something steady enough to still be there next week.