satya

The word of the day is satya. In sanskrit, satya means truth and it is one of the five yamas (observances). Let's talk about this. There's a teenager in my life whom I love dearly but sometimes says some pretty mean and hurtful things followed by, "What? I'm just telling the truth." Sound familiar? Maybe there's a teenager in your life who does the same thing. Or even worse, an adult! Either way, the truth is important, but remember the ahimsa blog? Non-violence, non-harming? These two yamas go hand in hand. We can apply them all over the place in our lives, on the yoga mat and off. Let me give you an example.

Last week, I took a yoga class. I thought I was feeling great, but that first crescent moon pose told me otherwise. My usually very happy and open hips were screaming at me to give them a break. At first, I chose not to listen. I was ignoring my truth, that day being that my hips needed to rest. I was able to let go of my open-hipped ego and skip the hip openers all together. There's an example of ahimsa on the mat. There are days when our heels don't touch the mat in down dog when they normally might. There are days when we can't hold our balance in our usually beloved tree pose. By not judging ourselves and beating ourselves up when things like this happen, we can all practice ahimsa.

At some point or another, we've all likely been guilty of saying something hurtful to another human. While we may have found the statement to be true ("that shirt is ugly!"), we should also consider that if it might hurt someone else, it shouldn't be said. Or perhaps we could word things in a more thoughtful manner. But before we can care about hurting others, we must first care about hurting ourselves. Practicing satya and ahimsa on our mats is the greatest way (in my opinion, for what that's worth) to learn to take those observances out into the world and apply them to our daily lives.