How do yogis and saints restrain themselves from sense pleasures when there's much to enjoy in life?

This is a marvelous question, and, as usual, I will share from my personal experience.

I am neither a saint nor a yogi, however, all such things dissolved on their own accord by placing my deep longing, my attention, and my love on my Spiritual Guide.

Now, that is a recipe for complete, total disaster, IF, your Spiritual Guide is not at the pinnacle of purity themselves.

I didn’t get lucky in that regard, I hit the jackpot.

The wonderful Master, Babuji, felt my earnest longing in his infinite field and brought me to and into himself. Very naturally, as I grew into this sacred environment all sense pleasures bid farewell without struggle, not overnight, but in a natural way.

Now, I struggled for sure, too many times to count, but that was because I didn’t yet have the faith, courage, or ability to understand the help I was being given.

From the Master’s perspective, they are not at all concerned, they are completely aware that you will reach your goal, because of their own ability, not because of my lack of ability.

This is because of one very beautiful word that we need to bring back to the mainstream: GRACE.

I have a little joke that man’s greatest invention is foolishness because without it there is no need for Grace!

Now in centuries and decades past, yogis did all sorts of intense practices to kill off the senses. There is no use in such self-denial as Buddha discovered.

It all comes down to this:

The urge for reproduction is infused by nature to preserve creation. Nothing wrong with it.

The difficulty arises from our focusing on the repetition of the feeling and elaborating with all sorts of mental fantasies.

The more we think about something - ANYTHING, we are giving it power. More and more power.