Santosha: Falling in Love with Life
The proverb "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear" is how my exploration of yoga’s ethical teachings has felt over the past 7 months. Each month, the perfect obstacles and opportunities to practice these principles arose. Santosha, or contentment, is the teaching we’re exploring this month and once again I’ve been invited to walk my talk. Initially what became clear is what contentment isn’t. It isn’t complacency or condoning difficult situations or behaviors. In fact, wanting things to be different than they are is a direct path to discontentment and suffering and when we look for contentment from outer circumstances we create suffering. The experience of Santosha isn’t about those moments where everything is going our way. Santosha is about finding a depth of acceptance when things are hard – which then cultivates our capacity to be with life's challenges. From this inner journey, a presence emerges that makes it possible to feel both vulnerability and sorrow in the core of our being. Somehow not needing the moment to be different is exactly what transforms the suffering into a love that encompasses all experiences.
It can seem daunting to know how to step off the well-worn path of believing that if we just had the right partner, job, government or new shiny object, then we would be content. Seeking contentment in this way is deeply embedded into our culture and foundational to our economic systems. Learning to become content with our discontentment is a great place to start. Cultivating gratitude for what we do have is a balm for the longing that discontentment creates. Accepting that there can’t be something different in the moment guides us towards presence and this is both the process and the experience of contentment.
I’ve witnessed time and time again how initiations that may come in the form of loss or heartbreak become thresholds in our lives. When we greet these moments with presence, we can fully digest what’s unfolding. Instead of wishing things were different or wondering how to make things better, we fully receive and integrate each moment as it is. If we choose to step into the river and trust the flow we discover freedom and a depth of contentment that was previously unfathomable. If we let it, life has a way of melting away the layers of resistance until we remember that at our core we are love. Santosha offers us a strength of will and gentleness of heart so we can meet each moment with our love.
Much love,
Sue