Asceticism
is of no great importance.

There is a better way to treat one's passions
than to pile on oneself ascetic practices
which so often reveal a great ego
and create more, instead of less, self-consciousness.

If you wish
to discipline the flesh and make it a thousand times more
subject, then place on it the bridle of love.
Whoever has accepted this sweet burden of the bridle of love
will attain more
and come much further
than all the penitential practices and mortifications
that all the people in the world acting together
could ever carry out.

Whoever has found this way
needs no other.

-Meister Eckhart