Discipline or attachment

Practice in Yoga can be hard. You hear about all the rules. Real Yogis eat an Ayrevedic diet, they do not consume intoxicants, they do asana and meditate, a little pranayama and most importantly practice ahimsa, non harming. All of that requires a great deal of work to integrate into a Western lifestyle where pleasure seeking and instant gratification are on the menu. So recently I have been having thoughts about whether I am a good enough Yogi. That means I was creating a comparison sheet of my lifestyle to those other Yogis I know. Then real help came. I was reading a Tantra book and it described how some Yogis attach to the idea of being pure. This was me! I was attaching to the idea that There is either following the rules and that being good or not following the rules and that being bad. I attached to the idea that if I wasn't disciplined, I wasn't good enough. And yet the whole point of any practice is to learn non attachment. To allow the flow of life and our own actions and in that we become free. Now... I do recognize that the point of discipline initially is to teach the benefits of not numbing out or pleasure seeking. All of these practices, the meditation, the asana and the proper food and rest, have been necessary to getting clear enough, open enough, to hear the heart and to learn to listen. It is from this place, I can discern what is non harming for myself and others more readily. The idea that my heart knows what is best for me... Hmmmm... There is freedom.